Download or read book Dirty Words in Deadwood written by Melody Graulich and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-02-17 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dirty Words in "Deadwood" showcases literary analyses of the Deadwood television series by leading western American literary critics. Whereas previous reaction to the series has largely addressed the question of historical accuracy rather than intertextuality or literary complexity, Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi's edited volume brings a much-needed perspective to Deadwood's representation of the frontier West. As Graulich observes in her introduction: "With its emotional coherence, compelling characterizations, compressed structural brilliance, moral ambiguity, language experiments, interpretation of the past, relevance to the present, and engagement with its literary forebears, Deadwood is an aesthetic triumph as historical fiction and, like much great literature, makes a case for the humanistic value of storytelling." From previously unpublished interviews with series creator David Milch to explorations of sexuality, disability, cinematic technique, and western narrative, this collection focuses on Deadwood as a series ultimately about the imagination, as a verbal and visual construct, and as a literary masterpiece that richly rewards close analysis and interpretation.
Download or read book Dirty Words in Deadwood written by Melody Graulich and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dirty Words in “Deadwood” showcases literary analyses of the Deadwood television series by leading western American literary critics. Whereas previous reaction to the series has largely addressed the question of historical accuracy rather than intertextuality or literary complexity, Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi’s edited volume brings a much-needed perspective to Deadwood’s representation of the frontier West. As Graulich observes in her introduction: “With its emotional coherence, compelling characterizations, compressed structural brilliance, moral ambiguity, language experiments, interpretation of the past, relevance to the present, and engagement with its literary forebears, Deadwood is an aesthetic triumph as historical fiction and, like much great literature, makes a case for the humanistic value of storytelling.” From previously unpublished interviews with series creator David Milch to explorations of sexuality, disability, cinematic technique, and western narrative, this collection focuses on Deadwood as a series ultimately about the imagination, as a verbal and visual construct, and as a literary masterpiece that richly rewards close analysis and interpretation.
Download or read book Deadwood and Shakespeare written by Susan Cosby Ronnenberg and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in politically unstable environments, Shakespeare's history plays--Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV and Henry V--and HBO's Western series Deadwood (2004-2006) all stand as critiques of myths of national origin, the sanitized stories we tell ourselves about how power imposes order on chaos. Drawing parallels between the Shakespeare plays and Deadwood, the author explores questions about legitimate political authority, the qualities of an effective leader, gender roles and community, and the reciprocal relationship between past and present in historical narratives.
Download or read book Deadwood written by Pete Dexter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-07-12 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DEADWOOD, DAKOTA TERRITORIES, 1876: Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepeneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real wild west, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.
Download or read book The F Word written by Jesse Sheidlower and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all know what frak, popularized by television's cult hit Battlestar Galactica, really means. But what about feck? Or ferkin? Or foul--as in FUBAR, or "Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition"? In a thoroughly updated edition of The F-Word, Jesse Sheidlower offers a rich, revealing look at the f-bomb and its illimitable uses. Since the fifteenth century, no other word has been adapted, interpreted, euphemized, censored, and shouted with as much ardor or force; imagine Dick Cheney telling Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy to "go damn himself" on the Senate floor--it doesn't have quite the same impact as what was really said. Sheidlower cites this and other notorious examples throughout history, from the satiric sixteenth-century poetry of James Cranstoun to the bawdy parodies of Lord Rochester in the seventeenth century, to more recent uses by Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Ann Sexton, Norman Mailer, Liz Phair, Anthony Bourdain, Junot Diaz, Jenna Jameson, Amy Winehouse, Jon Stewart, and Bono (whose use of the word at the Grammys nearly got him fined by the FCC). Collectively, these references and the more than one hundred new entries they illustrate double the size of The F-Word since its previous edition. Thousands of added quotations come from newly available electronic databases and the resources of the OED, expanding the range of quotations to cover British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Irish, and South African uses in addition to American ones. Thus we learn why a fugly must hone his or her sense of humor, why Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau muttered "fuddle duddle" in the Commons, and why Fanny Adams is so sweet. A fascinating introductory essay explores the word's history, reputation, and changing popularity over time. and a new Foreword by comedian, actor, and author Lewis Black offers readers a smart and entertaining take on the book and its subject matter. Oxford dictionaries have won renown for their expansive, historical approach to words and their etymologies. The F-Word offers all that and more in an entertaining and informative look at a word that, while now largely accepted as an integral part of the English language, still confounds, provokes, and scandalizes.
Download or read book Imagining Wild Bill written by Paul Ashdown and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wild Bill’s ever-evolving legend When it came to the Wild West, the nineteenth-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok’s story was no exception. Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive. Rather than attempt to tease truth from fiction, coauthors Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill investigate the ways in which Hickok embodied the culture of glamorized violence Americans embraced after the Civil War and examine the process of how his story emerged, evolved, and turned into a viral multimedia sensation full of the excitement, danger, and romance of the West. Journalists, the coauthors demonstrate, invented “Wild Bill” Hickok, glorifying him as a civilizer. They inflated his body count and constructed his legend in the midst of an emerging celebrity culture that grew up around penny newspapers. His death by treachery, at a relatively young age, made the story tragic, and dime-store novelists took over where the press left off. Reimagined as entertainment, Hickok’s legend continued to enthrall Americans in literature, on radio, on television, and in the movies, and it still draws tourists to notorious Deadwood, South Dakota. American culture often embraces myths that later become accepted as popular history. By investigating the allure and power of Hickok’s myth, Ashdown and Caudill explain how American journalism and popular culture have shaped the way Civil War–era figures are remembered and reveal how Americans have embraced violence as entertainment.
Download or read book Calamity written by Karen Jones and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating new account of the life and legend of the Wild West's most notorious woman: Calamity Jane Martha Jane Canary, popularly known as Calamity Jane, was the pistol-packing, rootin' tootin' "lady wildcat" of the American West. Brave and resourceful, she held her own with the men of America's most colorful era and became a celebrity both in her own right and through her association with the likes of Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody. In this engaging account, Karen Jones takes a fresh look at the story of this iconic frontierswoman. She pieces together what is known of Canary's life and shows how a rough and itinerant lifestyle paved the way for the scattergun, alcohol-fueled heroics that dominated Canary's career. Spanning Canary's rise from humble origins to her role as "heroine of the plains" and the embellishment of her image over subsequent decades, Jones shows her to be feisty, eccentric, transgressive--and very much complicit in the making of the myth that was Calamity Jane.
Download or read book Captivating Westerns written by Susan Kollin and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the transnational influences of what has been known as a uniquely American genre, “the Western,” Susan Kollin’s Captivating Westerns analyzes key moments in the history of multicultural encounters between the Middle East and the American West. In particular the book examines how experiences of contact and conflict have played a role in defining the western United States as a crucial American landscape. Kollin interprets the popular Western as a powerful national narrative and presents the cowboy hero as a captivating figure who upholds traditional American notions of freedom and promise, not just in the region but across the globe. Captivating Westerns revisits popular uses of the Western plot and cowboy hero in understanding American global power in the post-9/11 period. Although various attempts to build a case for the war on terror have referenced this quintessential American region, genre, and hero, they have largely overlooked the ways in which these celebrated spaces, icons, and forms, rather than being uniquely American, are instead the result of numerous encounters with and influences from the Middle East. By tracing this history of contact, encounter, and borrowing, this study expands the scope of transnational studies of the cowboy and the Western and in so doing discloses the powerful and productive influence the Middle East has had on the American West.
Download or read book Reading as Democracy in Crisis written by James Rovira and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-26 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History explores the dialectic between historical conditions and the reading strategies that arise from them. Chapters covering Plato and Derrida; G.W.F. Hegel; Karl Marx; Ludwig Wittgenstein; Robert Penn Warren; Louise Rosenblatt; Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida; Judith Butler; and Object Oriented Ontology and Digital Humanities provide overviews of and arguments about each subject’s thought in its historical contexts, suggesting how the reading strategies adopted in each case were in part motivated by specific historical circumstances. As the introduction explains, these circumstances often involved forms of democracy in crisis, so that the collection as a whole is an engagement with the dialectic between democracies that are perpetually in crisis and the seemingly unlimited freedom of our reading practices.
Download or read book A History of Western American Literature written by Susan Kollin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-11 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American West is a complex region that has inspired generations of writers and artists. Often portrayed as a quintessential landscape that symbolizes promise and progress for a developing nation, the American West is also a diverse space that has experienced conflicting and competing hopes and expectations. While it is frequently imagined as a place enabling dreams of new beginnings for settler communities, it is likewise home to long-standing indigenous populations as well as many other ethnic and racial groups who have often produced different visions of the land. This History encompasses the intricacy of Western American literature by exploring myriad genres and cultural movements, from ecocriticism, settler colonial studies and transnational theory, to race, ethnic, gender and sexuality studies. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the West as a site that sustains canonical and emerging authors alike, and as a region that exceeds national boundaries in addressing long-standing global concerns and developments.
Download or read book Teaching Western American Literature written by Brady Harrison and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume experienced and new college- and university-level teachers will find practical, adaptable strategies for designing or updating courses in western American literature and western studies. Teaching Western American Literature features the latest developments in western literary research and cultural studies as well as pedagogical best practices in course development. Contributors provide practical models and suggestions for courses and assignments while presenting concrete strategies for teaching works both inside and outside the canon. In addition, Brady Harrison and Randi Lynn Tanglen have assembled insights from pioneering western studies instructors with workable strategies and practical advice for translating this often complex material for classrooms from freshman writing courses to graduate seminars. Teaching Western American Literature reflects the cutting edge of western American literary study, featuring diverse approaches allied with women's, gender, queer, environmental, disability, and Indigenous studies and providing instructors with entrée into classrooms of leading scholars in the field.
Download or read book A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West written by Nicolas S. Witschi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism written by Keith Newlin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.
Download or read book A Planetary Lens written by Audrey Goodman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Planetary Lens explores how women writers and photographers revise and reimagine landscape, identity, and history in the U.S. West.
Download or read book Before the West Was West written by Amy T. Hamilton and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the West Was West examines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 “western” texts and asks what we mean by “western” American literature in the first place and when that designation originated. Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the “American West” in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s, Before the West Was West explores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and the Pony Express, these thirteen essays demonstrate that no single, unified idea or geography defines the American West. Contributors investigate texts ranging from the Norse Vinland Sagas and Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative to early Spanish and French exploration narratives, an eighteenth-century English novel, and a play by Aphra Behn. Through its examination of the disparate and multifaceted body of literature that arises from a broad array of cultural backgrounds and influences, Before the West Was West apprehends the literary West in temporal as well as spatial and cultural terms and poses new questions about “westernness” and its literary representation.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American West written by Steven Frye and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.
Download or read book Beyond the Fruited Plain written by Kathryn Cornell Dolan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agriculture in the United States has changed dramatically in the last two hundred years. Economic transformation marked by the expansion of the industrial economy and big business has contributed to an increase in industrial food production. Amid this change, policymakers and cultural critics have debated the best way to produce food and wealth for an expanding population with imperialistic tendencies. In a sweeping overview, Beyond the Fruited Plain traces the connections between nineteenth-century literature, agriculture, and U.S. territorial and economic expansion. Bringing together theories of globalization and ecocriticism, Kathryn Cornell Dolan offers new readings on the texts of such literary figures as Herman Melville, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as they examine conflicts of food, labor, class, race, gender, and time—issues still influencing U.S. food politics today. Beyond the Fruited Plain shows how these authors use their literature to imagine agricultural alternatives to national practices and in so doing prefigure twenty-first-century concerns about globalization, resource depletion, food security, and the relation of industrial agriculture to pollution, disease, and climate change.
