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In 1952, William Faulkner travelled to Cleveland, Mississippi to address a group of Delta planters and businessmen.1 In the speech he delivered that day, "he ... sounded at first a little like [a] Mississippi farmer,"2 a descendant, perhaps, of those "tall men" he describes in an earlier eponymous short story; an heir, that is, to the frontier tradition of rugged individualism and the strenuous life. Faulkner in fact laments the loss of these very values in this address, and he holds up as the preferred "old tough durable models" - both real and imagined - Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed, as well as southern frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. (James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo is notably absent from this list). Faulkner's reference to the heroes of a frontier past is telling, and lays the groundwork for a reading of his major works in a US literary and broader discursive tradition of the frontier. The critical approach I propose here, in an exemplary reading of Go Down, Moses within the structures of the myth of the frontier, constructs a frame that draws on frontier and Western narratives. This is a transregionalist model for reading as it draws on tropes and meanings derived from narratives of the US West - and thus goes some way in addressing the ongoing problem in regionalist studies that Douglas Powell identifies in Critical Regionalism: "In the study of regionalism in the United States ... the various critical and scholarly endeavours have clustered ... around the regions themselves ... New England Studies, Appalachian Studies, Southern Studies, Western Studies all engage in often-parallel but less-often collaborative projects."3 As a kind of corrective to this perceived shortcoming, I read the wilderness chapters of Go Down, Moses - "The Old People," "The Bear," and "Delta Autumn" - to argue that this allegedly southern narrative, of the establishment of a plantation society, in fact engages with and revises the tropes and credo of the national frontier myth that the narrative's protagonist, planter's son Ike McCaslin, strives to construct and embrace.4
Scholarly interest in frontiers has recently emerged within the new southern studies, a result of its interest in borders and their rupture, envisaged as...