and Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity, and reported the following:
A reader using Ford Madox Ford’s Page 99 Test to get a quick take on my book As Legend Has It would come away with an accurate but incomplete picture of the book’s aims and evidence. Page 99 reveals the book’s focus on historical legends as shared by Swedish Americans of the 19th and 20th centuries. Readers might be surprised to see that these legends include narratives about Jesse and Frank James and Wild Bill Hickok—legends that one might expect to be outside of ethnic American experience. Yet, page 99 also refers to Big Gust, a quintessentially Swedish American strongman character. So page 99 browsers would understand that Swedish American legendry is a mixed repertoire in which mainstream lore intermingles with ethnic lore.Learn more about As Legend Has It at the University of Wisconsin Press website.
On page 99, my analysis of legends focuses on how men and women were depicted, especially the stereotypical depiction of Swedish American men as “sturdy and strong.” I also comment on the degree to which the James brothers and Hickok were seen as benevolent characters, the James brothers fitting the Robin Hood niche in American outlaw lore. Readers of page 99 would also see that my aims include categorizing legends as well as analyzing them, with many of the legend texts quoted at some length as evidence for my generalizations.
These page-99 indicators give readers only a partial glimpse, though, of the gist of As Legend Has It. The book looks not just at historical legends of the Swedish Americans but also at how these narratives were used by local communities to write local histories in which they framed a sense of hyphenated ethnic and American heritage. Chapters about historical legend and local history writing describe the structure and textual qualities of these two vernacular genres using a combination of methods from folkloristics and Swedish American studies. The analysis reaches well beyond merely categorizing and identifying gender stereotypes to develop how legends and local histories use rhetorical strategies to argue for heritage and how these genres can become the basis for ostensive action.
I hope that a reader using the Page 99 Test with As Legend Has It would be tantalized to read further about this topic that I find fascinating: how ordinary people use their own stories to express a sense of community heritage.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
