We Who Work the West

Class, Labor, and Space in Western American Literature

Kiara Kharpertian, Carlo Rotella, Christopher P. Wilson

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496208842
• eBook ISBN: 9781496220936
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

We Who Work the West examines literary representations of class, labor, and space in the American West from 1885 to 2012. Moving from María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's representations of dispossessed Californio ranchers in the mid-nineteenth century to the urban grid of early twentieth-century San Francisco in Frank Norris's McTeague to working and unemployed cowboys in the contemporary novels of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, Kiara Kharpertian provides a panoramic look at literary renderings of both individual labor—physical, tangible, and often threatened handwork—and the epochal transformations of central institutions of a modernizing West: the farm, the ranchero, the mine, the rodeo, and the Native American reservation. The West that emerges here is both dynamic and diverse, its on-the-ground organization of work, social class, individual mobility, and collective belonging constantly mutating in direct response to historical change and the demands of the natural environment. The literary West thus becomes more than a locus of mythic nostalgia or consumer fantasy about the American past. It becomes a place where the real work of making that West, as well as the suffering and loss it often entailed, is reimagined.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Naturalism’s Handiwork
• 2. Civic Identity and the Ethos of Belonging
• 3. Watching the West Erode in the 1930s
• 4. He Was a Good Cowboy
• 5. Tradition and Modernization Battle It Out on Rocky Soil
• 6. From Prairie to Oil
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About Kiara Kharpertian
• About Carlo Rotella
• About Christopher P. Wilson
• Series List