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Articles

Volume 06, Number 2 (1981)

Extravagant Expression of Travel and Growth: Grove's Quest for America

  • K. P. Stich
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1981-06-06

Abstract

F.P. Grove, in his main autobiographical creations A Search for America, Over Prairie Trails, and In Search of Myself, fails to be extravagant enough to achieve a new identity. He methodically manipulates connections between travels in geographical and psychological space, and he is a no less accomplished poseur or trickster in his life as a writer in North America than in his past in Europe. By focusing on metaphors, puns, and related linguistic foregrounding, one can observe Grove's complex game of hide-and-seek with the reader; that is, one can see that the actualities of Grove's European past are intricately concealed behind biographical innuendoes and a deceptively simple foregrounding of North American incidents and setting.