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The Frontier In Books, Richard Clement

Richard W. Clement

Unique among contemporary Western nations, the American national identity was created from present and living memory, unlike the English modern national identity, which was created out of distant memories from an era many centuries past. The English visions, which hearkened back to Anglo-Saxon England and the mythical Arthurian realms, were mediated by a small group of scholars who alone could understand the ancient languages. The books those scholars wrote were then read by a narrow circle of educated people who reinterpreted the ancient histories and myths for the general public, and in time the sense of what medieval England had …