ABSTRACT
The cultural critic Fredric Jameson once claimed historians while they were writing must think 'self-consciously about their own thought', to be both 'conscious and self-conscious' at one and the same time. Turner's deconstruction of the American past meant rejecting the European-biased Teutonic origins theory dominating American history, offering instead 'a steady growth of independence on American lines' which directly related the 'free land' of the frontier and the exceptional character of American nationality. The political and cultural implications of the swift emergence of metropolitanism, industrialism and cosmopolitanism were vast, producing slums, municipal corruption, the vilest conditions of factory life, racism and the trust. The Turner Thesis as a signifier collapses both meaning and form, its first-order linguistic meaning extant as a narrative explanation of American history, its second-order mythic dimension acting to contain the class and industrial contradictions introduced into the bourgeois culture of the new order.
