Download or read book Myth of the Western written by Carter Matthew Carter and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the nature of the relationship between the Hollywood Western and American frontier mythology? How have Western films helped develop cultural and historical perceptions, attitudes and beliefs towards the frontier? Is there still a place for the genre in light of revisionist histories of the American West?Myth of the Western re-invigorates the debate surrounding the relationship between the Western and frontier mythology, arguing for the importance of the genre's socio-cultural, historical and political dimensions. Taking a number of critical-theoretical and philosophical approaches, Matthew Carter applies them to prominent forms of frontier historiography. He also considers the historiographic element of the Western by exploring the different ways in which the genre has responded to the issues raised by the frontier. Carter skilfully argues that the genre has - and continues to reveal - the complexities and contradictions at the heart of US society. With its clear analyses of and intellectual challenges to the film scholarship that has developed around the Western over a 65-year period, this book adds new depth to our understanding of specific film texts and of the genre as a whole - a welcome resource for students and scholars in both Film Studies and American Studies.

Download or read book Butcher s Crossing written by John Williams and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-03-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky. In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Download or read book The Western Story fact Fiction and Myth written by Philip Durham and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P. This book was released on 1975 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Reading the West written by Michael Kowalewski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-23 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American West of myth and legend has always exerted a strong hold on the popular imagination, and the essays in Reading the West examine some of the basis of that fascination. Reading the West, first published in 1996, is a collection of critical essays by writers, independent scholars and critics on the literature of the American West in the last two centuries. It showcases new ways of reading and understanding western writing. Arguing for the importance of 'place' in literature, these essays explore what makes representative literary works 'western'. They also explore the multicultural and ecological dimensions of western writing. This volume helps enrich our understanding of a distinguished body of literary work which has sometimes been unjustly ignored. It deals not only with literature but with the changing conception of the West in the American imagination.

Download or read book Redrawing the Western written by William Grady and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2024-11-12 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of American Western genre comics and how they interacted with contemporaneous political and popular culture. Redrawing the Western charts a history of the Western genre in American comics from the late 1800s through the 1970s and beyond. Encompassing the core years in which the genre was forged and prospered in a range of popular media, Grady engages with several key historical timeframes, from the origins of the Western in the nineteenth-century illustrated press; through fin de siècle anxieties with the closing of the frontier, and the centrality of cowboy adventure across the interwar, postwar, and high Cold War years; to the revisions of the genre in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Western’s continued vitality in contemporary comics storytelling. In its study of stories about vengeance, conquest, and justice on the contested frontier, Redrawing the Western highlights how the “simplistic” conflicts common in Western adventure comics could disguise highly political undercurrents, providing young readers with new ways to think about the contemporaneous social and political milieu. Besides tracing the history, forms, and politics of American Western comics in and around the twentieth century, William Grady offers an original reassessment of the important role of comics in the development of the Western genre, ranking them alongside popular fiction and film in the process.

Download or read book A Literary History of the American West written by Western Literature Association (U.S.) and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 1408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary histories, of course, do not have a reason for being unless there exists the literature itself. This volume, perhaps more than others of its kind, is an expression of appreciation for the talented and dedicated literary artists who ignored the odds, avoided temptations to write for popularity or prestige, and chose to write honestly about the American West, believing that experiences long knowns to be of historical importance are also experiences that need and deserve a literature of importance.

Download or read book The Comic Book Western written by Christopher Conway and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-06 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comic Book Western explores how the myth of the American West played out in popular comics from around the world.

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 The Wild West written by Frederick Nolan and published by Arcturus Publishing. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 14 May 1804, one Captain Meriwether Lewis and his companion William Clark led a thirty-three-man expedition to the new lands of Louisiana. 8,000 miles and two years later, after rafting up the Missouri and crossing the Rocky Mountains, they reached the far side of the world, the Pacific Ocean. Fredrick Nolan explores the first US settlers of the American West, including the remarkable stories of unsung heroes and heroines, the bloody battles between settlers and the native American inhabitants, the crimes committed by corrupt Sheriffs, and the occasions when citizens had to take the law into their own hands. This is the story of the men and women who answered the call of the West.

Download or read book Hollywood Westerns and American Myth written by Robert B. Pippin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking book one of America’s most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks’ Red River and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers.Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its “second founding,” or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state’s claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected.Pippin’s account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the center of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favor of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy.

Download or read book Myth and Environment in Recent Southwestern Literature written by Theda Wrede and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The romantic perception of the American Southwest as a wild and dangerous frontier where heroic settlers prove their endurance has often responded to a common human desire to escape from the pressures of civilization and experience an “authentic” relationship with nature. This idealized notion about life in the Southwest, however, has contributed the subjugation of the indigenous populations and the natural world while helping rationalize the conquest of both. In Myth and Environment in Recent Southwestern Literature, Theda Wrede brings contemporary Southwestern American literature under the microscope to examine the ways in which the mythic narrative has influenced attitudes toward the land in the region. Focusing on popular novels by Corrmac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Denise Chávez, Wrede explores the psychology behind the myth and discusses the ways in which the four authors deploy the mythic narrative, interrogate its validity, and offer visions for alternative modes of inhabiting the Southwest. In combining ideas from a culturally sensitive ecofeminist theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, and literary studies, the study offers an innovative conceptual framework for discussions about environmental responsibility in the twenty-first century. Finally, it also encourages its readers to partake in the process of mythogenesis by imagining “sustainable” narratives to help rescue the promise of the Southwest for the new millennium.

Download or read book Robert Altman s McCabe Mrs Miller written by Robert T. Self and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reclaims, reframes, and reexamines one of acclaimed maverick filmmaker Robert Altman's most accomplished and admired movies, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, as a commentary on Western history, the Western film, the times from which it emerged, and as a tribute to a neglected masterpiece of American cinema.

Download or read book The Wister Trace written by Loren D. Estleman and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-09-29 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A master practitioner’s view of his craft, this classic survey of the fiction of the American West is part literary history, part criticism, and entertaining throughout. The first edition of The Wister Trace was published in 1987, when Larry McMurtry had just reinvented himself as a writer of Westerns and Cormac McCarthy’s career had not yet taken off. Loren D. Estleman’s long-overdue update connects these new masters with older writers, assesses the genre’s past, present, and future, and takes account of the renaissance of western movies, as well. Estleman’s title indicates the importance he assigns Owen Wister’s 1902 classic, The Virginian. Wister was not the first writer of Westerns, but he defined the genre, contrasting chivalry with the lawlessness of the border and introducing such lines as “When you call me that, smile!” Estleman tips his hat to Wister’s predecessors, among them Ned Buntline, the inventor of the dime novel, and Buffalo Bill. His assessments of Wister’s successors—Zane Grey, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Louis L’Amour, to name but three—soon make clear the impossibility of differentiating great western writing from great American writing. Especially important in this new edition is the attention to women writers. The author devotes a chapter each to Dorothy Johnson—author of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”—and Annie Proulx, whose Wyoming stories include “Brokeback Mountain.” In his discussion of movies, Estleman includes a list of film adaptations that will guide readers to movies, and moviegoers to books. An appendix draws readers’ attention to authors not covered elsewhere in the volume—some of them old masters like Bret Harte and Jack London, but many of them fascinating outliers ranging from Clifford Irving to Joe R. Lansdale.

Download or read book The Power of the Dog written by Thomas Savage and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2009-09-26 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now an Academy Award-winning Netflix film by Jane Campion, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst: Thomas Savage's acclaimed Western is "a pitch-perfect evocation of time and place" (Boston Globe) for fans of East of Eden and Brokeback Mountain. Set in the wide-open spaces of the American West, The Power of the Dog is a stunning story of domestic tyranny, brutal masculinity, and thrilling defiance from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in American literature. The novel tells the story of two brothers — one magnetic but cruel, the other gentle and quiet — and of the mother and son whose arrival on the brothers’ ranch shatters an already tenuous peace. From the novel’s startling first paragraph to its very last word, Thomas Savage’s voice — and the intense passion of his characters — holds readers in thrall. "Gripping and powerful...A work of literary art." —Annie Proulx, from her afterword

Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Great Plains written by David J. Wishart and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wishart and the staff of the Center for Great Plains Studies have compiled a wide-ranging (pun intended) encyclopedia of this important region. Their objective was to 'give definition to a region that has traditionally been poorly defined,' and they have

Download or read book American Studies written by Jack Salzman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-08-29 with total page 980 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major three-volume bibliography, including an additional supplement, of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1900 and 1988.

Download or read book John Ford s Stagecoach written by Barry Keith Grant and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents