Download or read book There Must be a Lone Ranger written by Jenni Calder and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Slow Road to Brownsville written by David Reynolds and published by Greystone Books. This book was released on 2014-09-20 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An adventurous Englishman explores the forgotten landscape of America’s Wild West in this “illuminating, elegantly written travelogue” (Financial Times). In his acclaimed memoir Swan River, David Reynolds invited readers into the world of his youth, growing up in Manitoba, Canada. Now, in Slow Road to Brownsville, Reynolds brings readers on a road trip along Highway 83, a little-known two-lane highway that runs from his Canadian hometown to the Mexican border at Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. Enthralled by the myth of the American West and the romance of the open road, Reynolds explores the realities behind both as he makes his way between small towns, gas stations, and motels, hanging out in bars with the locals and learning the stories of this forgotten region that was once the frontier. Along the way he encounters many legendary figures from North American history, including Lewis and Clark, Sitting Bull, Buffalo Bill, Davy Crockett, and even Truman Capote.
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 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 Lost in the Backwoods written by Jenni Calder and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the American wilderness shaped Scottish experience, imagination and identity. How is the Scottish imagination shaped by its emigre experience with wilderness and the extreme? Drawing on journals, emigrant guides, memoirs, letters, poetry and fiction, this book examines patterns of survival, defeat, adaptation and response in North America's harshest landscapes. Most Scots who crossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encountered the practical, moral and cultural challenges of the wilderness, with its many tensions and contradictions. Jenni Calder explores the effect of these experiences on the Scots imagination. Associated with displacement and disappearance, the 'wilderness' was also a source of adventure and redemption, of exploitation and spiritual regeneration, of freedom and restriction. An arena of greed, cruelty and cannibalism, of courage, generosity and mutual understanding, it brought out the best and the worst of humanity. Did the Scots who emigrated exchange one extreme for another, or did they discover a new idea of identity, freedom and landscape?
Download or read book He Was Some Kind of a Man written by Roderick McGillis and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2011-04-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western explores the construction and representation of masculinity in low-budget western movies made from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These films contained some of the mid-twentieth-century’s most familiar names, especially for youngsters: cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Red Ryder. The first serious study of a body of films that was central to the youth of two generations, He Was Some Kind of a Man combines the author’s childhood fascination with this genre with an interdisciplinary scholarly exploration of the films influence on modern views of masculinity. McGillis argues that the masculinity offered by these films is less one-dimensional than it is plural, perhaps contrary to expectations. Their deeply conservative values are edged with transgressive desire, and they construct a male figure who does not fit into binary categories, such as insider/outsider or masculine/feminine. Particularly relevant is the author’s discussion of George W. Bush as a cowboy and how his aspirations to cowboy ideals continue to shape American policy. This engagingly written book will appeal to the general reader interested in film, westerns, and contemporary culture as well as to scholars in film studies, gender studies, children’s literature, and auto/biography.
Download or read book Paths of Fire written by Andrew Nahum and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Type “Mikhail Kalashnikov” into Google and the biography of the inventor will come back to you almost at the speed of light. Squeeze the trigger of a Kalashnikov and a bullet is kicked up the barrel by an archaic chemical explosion that would have been quite familiar to Oliver Cromwell or General Custer. The gun—antique, yet contemporary—still dominates the world. Geopolitical events and even consumer culture have been molded by the often-unseen research that firearms evoked. The new science of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton owed much to the Renaissance study of ballistics. But research into making guns and aiming them also brought on the more recent invention of mass production and kickstarted the contemporary field of artificial intelligence. This book follows the history of the gun and its often-unsuspected wider linkages, looking from the first cannons to modern gunnery, and to the yet-to-be-realized electrical futures of rays and beams.
Download or read book The Mythic West in Twentieth century America written by Robert G. Athearn and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Briefly describes life in the West, and discusses the ephemeral nature of the region, western towns, the tourist industry, agriculture, fiction, and the ecology movement.
Download or read book The Western written by David Lusted and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Western introduces the novice to the pleasures and the meanings of the Western film, shares the excitement of the genre with the fan, addresses the suspicions of the cynic and develops the knowledge of the student. The Western is about the changing times of the Western, and about how it has been understood in film criticism. Until the 1980s, more Westerns were made than any other type of film. For fifty of those years, the genre was central to Hollywood's popularity and profitability. The Western explores the reasons for its success and its latter-day decline among film-makers and audiences alike. Part I charts the history of the Western film and its role in film studies. Part II traces the origins of the Western in nineteenth-century America, and in its literary, theatrical and visual imagining. This sets the scene to explore the many evolving forms in successive chapters on early silent Westerns, the series Western, the epic, the romance, the dystopian, the elegiac and, finally, the revisionist Western. The Western concludes with an extensive bibliography, filmography and select further reading. Over 200 Westerns are discussed, among them close accounts of classics such as Duel in the Sun, The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven, formative titles like John Ford's epic The Iron Horse, and early cowboy star William S. Hart's The Silent One together with less familiar titles that deserve wider recognition, including Comanche Station, Pursued and Ulzana's Raid.
Download or read book The Empire s Old Clothes written by Ariel Dorfman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this powerful cultural critique, Ariel Dorfman explores the political and social implications of the smiling faces that inhabit familiar books, comics, and magazines. He reveals the ideological messages conveyed in works of popular culture such as the Donald Duck comics, the Babar children’s books, and Reader’s Digest magazine. The Empire’s Old Clothes was widely praised when it was first published in 1983. This edition, including a new preface by the author, makes a contemporary classic newly available.
Download or read book Writing and America written by Gavin Cologne-Brookes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing and America surveys the writing genres that have contributed to the American notions of America . Essays from scholars from both side of the Atlantic chart the range of responses to American nationhood from colonial times to the present and include dissenting responses from communities such as native American, black and feminist writers. Case studies from writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and William Carlos Williams provide a framework for discussions on topics such as colonial notions of America as the promised land, the discourses of nationhood in the republic, the sense of nationhood in American historiography, and the formation of the American Canon. Draws upon extracts from the American Bills of Rights and the Constitution as examples of different types of writing.
Download or read book Letters From the Great Wall written by Jenni Daiches and published by Luath Press Ltd. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In leaving behind the physical closeness of her relationships with her long-term partner, parents, brother and family she is able to analyse and confront 'the mush of dissatisfaction' that had been expanding to fill her life. By lecturing in Beijing Eleanor is at once observer and observed, teacher and pupil. The novel culminates in Tiananmen Square, June 1989, as she finds herself drawn into the unfolding drama that led to one of the most momentous events of the 20th century.
Download or read book Westerns and the Trail of Tradition written by Barrie Hanfling and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past century, the western has fluctuated in popularity. By 2010 it has come to stand, to the dismay of many, at one of its lowest points. Beginning with 1929 and the advent of talkies (In Old Arizona), the author discusses the cultural and industry trends, the directors, producers, studios and especially the stars, and looks at the ways in which their personalities (and financial ups and downs) affected the way westerns were shot. The improvements in technology through the years, the trick horses, the fistfight choreography, the evolution of plotlines--these are fascinating indicators of the way Americans themselves were changing.
Download or read book Imagining the American West through Film and Tourism written by Warwick Frost and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The West is one of the strongest and most enduring place images in the world and its myth is firmly rooted in popular culture – whether novels, film, television, music, clothing and even video games. The West combines myth and history, rugged natural scenery and wide open spaces, popular culture and promises of transformation. These imagined places draw in tourists, attracted by a cultural heritage that is part fictional and mediatised. In turn, tourism operators and destination marketing organisations refashion what they present to fit these imagined images. This book explores this imagining of a mythic West through three key themes, travel, film and frontiers to offer new insight into how the imagination of the West and popular culture has influenced the construction of tourism. In doing so, it examines the series of paradoxes that underlie the basic appeal of the West: evocative frontier, a boundary zone between civilisation and wilderness and between order and lawlessness. It draws on a range of films and literature as well as varying places from festivals to national parks to showcase different aspects of the nexus between travel, film and frontiers in this fascinating region. Interdisciplinary in character, it includes perspectives from cultural studies, American studies, tourism and film studies. Written by leading academics, this title will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics in the fields of cultural studies, tourism, film studies and media studies and all those interested in film tourism.
Download or read book Film Study written by Frank Manchel and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 988 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The four volumes of Film Study include a fresh approach to each of the basic categories in the original edition. Volume one examines the film as film; volume two focuses on the thematic approach to film; volume three draws on the history of film; and volume four contains extensive appendices listing film distributors, sources, and historical information as well as an index of authors, titles, and film personalities.
Download or read book The Best of Times written by Wyn Wachhorst and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2016-01-06 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old-time radio, the folk revival, the golden age of science fiction, steam railroads, baseball, the Western, and other genres color our images of the 1950s. But contrary to the countercultural myth that America during this period was a sterile, soulless society, culturally and intellectually empty, it was an introspective era of innovation and creativity, the seedtime of the sixties, the harbinger of which was the urban folk revival. The Best of Times presents a collection of essays, each followed by a related memoir, focusing on postwar popular culture, exploring topics that mark the era but are also nostalgic in themselves—the comforting continuity of long-running radio shows, train whistles that brought the sweet sorrow of distance to small-town nights, lazy summers of baseball, endless stretches of unknown lands to the West that once compelled the imagination, the heroes and vagabonds of folksong who roamed a simpler world, and dreams of alien civilizations on neighboring planets, deepened by the dawning reality of spaceflight. These pieces balance personal, cultural, and mythic nostalgia, recalling author Wyn Wachhorst’s youth, the postwar era, and its dreams of a fabled West or Norman Rockwell’s small-town America. Blending history, memoir, imagery, and analysis, this collection of essays offers poetic reflections on the nature of nostalgia and postwar America.
Download or read book The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World written by Lawrence M. Wills and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-03-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawrence M. Wills here traces the literary evolution of popular Jewish narratives written during the period 200 BCE-100 CE. In many ways, these narratives were similar to Greek and Roman novels of the same era, as well as to popular novels of indigenous peoples within the Roman Empire. Yet, as a group, they demonstrated a variety of novelistic innovations: the inclusion of adventurous episodes, passages of description and of dialogue, concern with psychological motivation, and the introduction of female characters. Wills focuses on five novels: Greek Esther, Greek ,Daniel, Judith, Tobit, and Joseph and Aseneth.. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical works, he delineates the techniques and motifs of the Jewish novel, shows how the genre both initiated and distanced itself from nonfictional prose such as historical and philosophical writing, discusses its relation to Greco-Roman romance, and describes the social conditions governing its emergence and reception. Wills also places the novels in historical context, situating them between the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and subsequent developments in Jewish and Christian literature on the other. Wills sees the Jewish novel as a popular form of writing that provided amusement for an expanding audience of Jewish entrepreneurs, merchants, and bureaucrats. In an important sense, he maintains, it was a product of the "novelistic impulse": the impulse to transfer oral stories to a written medium to reach a more literate audience.
