Texas as heroic geography ? - Bottum

Within his longer commentary on "Local Color" Joseph Bottum in his "First Things / First Thoughts" blog remarked on "heroic geography."   He writes, "In other words, we don't have many heroic types in American literature. What we have instead is heroic geography. The Virginian, the Down Easterner, the Texas Ranger, the cowboy, the Hooiser, the hillbilly, the Okie. These are tropes that serve the moral function filled in other cultures and other literatures primarily by heroes. And these geographical tropes survive well into our own era of indistinguishable shopping malls from Maine to California." Read the context at http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/07/02/local-color/