A Sense of Place

In the early days of the United States, the revolutionary concepts of liberty, Enlightenment ideas about the goodness of the unencumbered individual, and the pull of the frontier combined to create such a fascination with movement that it discouraged a sense of place in American literature. All national literatures have some sense of place, but, in two centuries of American literature, places are generally oppressive and the protagonist has a great need to escape. Conditions were ripe for a literature with a dearth of heroes and a strong sense of place. Lamar comments that, unlike the American West, settlement on the Canadian prairies produced a "sense of place" because of the absence of "manifest destiny, and the burden of theory". The presence or absence of women is central to a sense of place in literature, as life on the road is the prerogative of men.