In the novels of James Lee Burke, the frontier operates on two main levels: first, as a means of dramatizing law and crime. Historical memory and cultural heritage is a key to a contemporary novelist who has done much to shed the hypocritical skin of a vacuous literary superiority towards crime fiction, by showing just how well he can write and why crime fiction is important. Given the global responsibilities of America and its record in foreign policy, the mere notion of the frontier allows an author to either endorse the prevailing cultural program or to subvert it by exposing it as a paradigm. It is a means of establishing and exploring contemporary morality, and a way of dramatizing an eroding heroism that is historically tenuous, to say the least. As such it is often used to explore the macrocosmic American situation both on a cultural and a political level. One thing that is prevalent is the fact that the idea of the frontier and the Virgin Land lingers in the American psyche like a facet of the great American Dream an idea of a pure land corrupted by the lawless, of limitless possibilities in a nation now eroded by crime and industrial corruption. From Fenimore Cooper to Melville, with his use of the microcosm of early American society in the Pequod and Ahab’s mad quest on the frontier of the oceans, from Mark Twain to Cormac McCarthy, whose use of the theme shows that America is still anchored to the Wild West, the frontier features again and again in various settings. In early American literature, the frontier assumed a key importance as both a motif of the early pioneering days of a new country and a means of exploring law and morality.
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