Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

Beginning with the link that autobiography makes explicit between personal and cultural experiences, certain New Western writers expand the boundaries of autobiography to produce revisionist narratives. The genre of autobiography exists in a metonymic, or part-to-part, relationship with both colonial and revisionist histories. New Western writers attempt to destabilize the historical authority attributed to autobiography by challenging the ahistorical and exclusionary effects of the conventionally autonomous and masculinist autobiographical voice. This study explores the political implications of New Western innovations in order to reconsider the relationship between narrative form and literary and historical revisionism.