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"West (U.S.) -- In literature"
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Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927
Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 recovers the names and works of hundreds of women who wrote about the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of them long forgotten and others better known novelists, poets, memoirists, and historians such as Willa Cather and Mary Austin Holley. Nina Baym mined literary and cultural histories, anthologies, scholarly essays, catalogs, advertisements, and online resources to debunk critical assumptions that women did not publish about the West as much as they did about other regions. Elucidating a substantial body of nearly 650 books of all kinds by more than 300 writers, Baym reveals how the authors showed women making lives for themselves in the West, how they represented the diverse region, and how they represented themselves. _x000B__x000B_Baym accounts for a wide range of genres and geographies, affirming that the literature of the West was always more than cowboy tales and dime novels. Nor did the West consist of a single landscape, as women living in the expanses of Texas saw a different world from that seen by women in gold rush California. Although many women writers of the American West accepted domestic agendas crucial to the development of families, farms, and businesses, they also found ways to be forceful agents of change, whether by taking on political positions, deriding male arrogance, or, as their voluminous published works show, speaking out when they were expected to be silent.
eBook
Dirty Wars
Since World War II, the American West has become the nation's military arsenal, proving ground, and disposal site. Through a wide-ranging discussion of recent literature produced in and about the West,Dirty Warsexplores how the region's iconic landscapes, invested with myths of national virtue, have obscured the West's crucial role in a post-World War II age of \"permanent war.\"
In readings of western-particularly southwestern-literature, John Beck provides a historically informed account of how the military-industrial economy, established to protect the United States after Pearl Harbor, has instead produced western waste lands and \"waste populations\" as the enemies and collateral casualties of a permanent state of emergency. Beck offers new readings of writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Rebecca Solnit, Julie Otsuka, and Terry Tempest Williams. He also draws on a variety of sources in history, political theory, philosophy, environmental studies, and other fields. ThroughoutDirty Wars, he identifies resonances between different experiences and representations of the West that allow us to think about internment policies, the manufacture of atomic weapons, the culture of Cold War security, border policing, and toxic pollution as part of a broader program of a sustained and invasive management of western space.
eBook
Playing House in the American West
Examines an eclectic group of western women’s
autobiographical texts—canonical and otherwise—
Playing House in the American West argues for a distinct
regional literary tradition characterized by strategic
representations of unconventional domestic life The
controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing
study is “playing house.” From Caroline Kirkland and
Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from
the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western
authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric
housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western
neighbors and eastern readers alike. The readings in
Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to
which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home:
evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race
and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional
gender roles. Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the
home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather
than as a site of sacrifice and obligation. The western women
examined in
Playing House in the American West are promoted and read
as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of
distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of
themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions,
they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a
place that fosters female agency, individuality, and
subjectivity.
eBook
Exploding the Western : myths of empire on the postmodern frontier
The frontier and Western expansionism are so quintessentially a part of American history that the literature of the West and Southwest is in some senses the least regional and the most national literature of all. The frontier—the place where cultures meet and rewrite themselves upon each other’s texts—continues to energize writers whose fiction evokes, destroys, and rebuilds the myth in ways that attract popular audiences and critics alike. Sara L. Spurgeon focuses on three writers whose works not only exemplify the kind of engagement with the theme of the frontier that modern authors make, but also show the range of cultural voices that are present in Southwestern literature: Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ana Castillo. Her central purposes are to consider how the differing versions of the Western “mythic” tales are being recast in a globalized world and to examine the ways in which they challenge and accommodate increasingly fluid and even dangerous racial, cultural, and international borders. In Spurgeon’s analysis, the spaces in which the works of these three writers collide offer some sharply differentiated visions but also create new and unsuspected forms, providing the most startling insights. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, the new myths are the expressions of the larger culture from which they spring, both a projection onto a troubled and troubling past and an insistent, prophetic vision of a shared future.
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Captivating Westerns
Tracing the transnational influences of what has been known as a uniquely American genre, \"the Western,\" Susan Kollin'sCaptivating Westernsanalyzes 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 Westernsrevisits 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 of the Middle East on the American West.
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