Cowboy Politics

Myths and Discourses in Popular Westerns from The Virginian to Unforgiven and Deadwood

John S. Nelson

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498549486
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The politics of popular westerns are surprising in substance and significance, especially of late. Cowboy Politics shows how westerns in literature, cinema, and television face the challenges of Western Civilization even more than the perils of American frontiers. Its strategy is to compare key westerns with major theories of modern and postmodern politics. So it analyzes novels from Owen Wister to Zane Grey and Larry McMurtry. It focuses on films from the western revival beginning in the 1990s and featuring Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, while its interest in TV stretches from singing cowboys and Gunsmoke to David Milch's Deadwood.
Critics are apt to find in westerns the modern politics of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. They tap devices of individuality, rationality, contract, sovereign enforcement, and representation to overcome the chaotic violence of a wild zone. Cowboy Politics examines how westerns often find such measures insufficient to tame the West as a culture of honor and anger that deteriorates into feud-al vengeance. Instead westerns see the West as the sunset land that is already growing old and moving on. So westerns seek fresh starts informed by comparing civilizations more than demonizing savages. Westerns worry that modern politics devolve into exploitation, oppression, spectacle, and terror. So they pursue supplements in such postmodern politics as republicanism, perfectionism, populism, feminism, and environmentalism. Especially westerns explore politics of persuasive speech-in-action-in-public, doing beauty, and self-reliance in the modes of Hannah Arendt and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The first two chapters of Cowboy Politics explain how westerns do political theory for popular audiences by making many of our myths: the symbolic stories of individuals and communities which we live daily. The next three chapters trace the initially modern theories of government in many westerns. Then western turns to republican honor, rhetoric, response-ability, and character tracking occupy the following four chapters. And these set the stage for another four chapters on western attention to postmodern terror, mythmaking, celebrity, spectacle, and forgiveness. The final two chapters analyze how "late," "satirical," and "transformative" westerns develop realist defenses for their surprisingly postmodern politics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 “The Signs in This Book Spoke to Him”
• Chapter 2 “The Stories of the West Are Many”
• Chapter 3 “Strike First and Then Give Tongue”
• Chapter 4 “Without Law, Man Becomes a Beast”
• Chapter 5 “The Cowboy Represents That Independent Spirit”
• Chapter 6 “Live with Honor and [Leave] Our Mark”
• Chapter 7 “What’s He Going to Get Out of This?”
• Chapter 8 “Why Had He Waited So Long to Speak?”
• Chapter 9 “A Track Is Not Only Marks upon the Earth”
• Chapter 10 “It’s Not Revenge He’s After; It’s a Reckoning”
• Chapter 11 “Accurate Description [with] Poetry to the Language”
• Chapter 12 “A Show Had to Be Real and Yet Not Real”
• Chapter 13 “Revenge Broke It, and Disease”
• Chapter 14 “Tell Him Something Pretty”
• Chapter 15 “In Whose Keeping Would the Horse Have Been?”
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author