Literature
Western Novels
Western novels are a genre of fiction set in the American Old West, typically featuring themes of adventure, exploration, and conflict. They often revolve around cowboys, outlaws, and settlers, and are known for their portrayal of rugged landscapes and the challenges of frontier life. These novels have been popular since the 19th century and continue to captivate readers with their depictions of the Wild West.
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4 Key excerpts on "Western Novels"
eBook - PDF- Shirley Samuels(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Indeed, the most important Western fiction came in the form of short stories: most of them appeared first in periodical form, then often being reprinted in the East, collected in an annual, and eventually perhaps in a collection of the author’s work. That is, Western short stories, like the Western population itself, were mobile, shifty, energetic, and opportunistic. The antebellum West, then, might be most profitably discussed in the context of other communities formed by English-speaking whites around the world. Most literary historians of settlement colonies divide locally produced fiction into two categories: frontier adventure and domestic settlement, the former written by and produced for men, the latter by and for women. In Australia, this division might be represented by Henry Lawson and Rosa Praed; in South Africa, by Bertram Mitford and Olive Schreiner (New 1996; Van Herk 1996). However, in the work itself, the division into ‘‘separate spheres’’ is often revealed as mythical, and the boundaries imported from the metropolis get smudged, becoming just one more way in which settlement experience differed from metropol-itan expectations. Likewise in the antebellum West, as best exemplified in the work of James Hall and Alice Cary, there is an important and problematic intertextuality within the genre each employs. While the adventure story and the domestic fiction each served a The West 389 nationalizing propagandistic purpose as practiced by metropolitan writers (Cooper and Kirkland, for example), colonial writers treat them simply as points of departure, and instead comment on the inadequacy of these standard narratives without forth-rightly rejecting them. Their ambivalence toward the conventions of their genres reflects their more general ambivalence toward the marginality of their communities in the nation or empire in which they lived and wrote, a complicated articulation that represents the apex of Western fiction’s achievement.
eBook - PDF- Stephen McVeigh(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- EUP(Publisher)
It would do this by focusing on the same elements the New Western — 148 — New Western Perspectives: History and Literature History would claim as their own fresh perspective: race, region, violence, conquest. The Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and a new awareness of the environment were the catalysts for the redefinition and revision of American history and institutions reflected in this literature. So traumatic were the events that inspired these novels, so roundly did they alter American self-concept that writing in this vein refused to acknowledge that there were any rules or boundaries, and it is this urge that perhaps most connects with the spirit of the New Western History. As the discussion of Western literature in Chapter 4 demonstrates, popular and literary Western fiction had the capacity to speak to audiences and their evolving social and political context, to remain relevant to contemporary America by endlessly replaying the themes of the frontier within a stable generic framework. Western fiction in the post-1960s period, however, gains much of its power, and ensures the genre’s relevance, by examining the genre’s values and concerns and, often, parodying its techniques. This period also witnessed the emergence of a rich variety of minority voices, among them the work of writers such as Shawn Wong, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ben Santos, Toma´ s Rivera, Hisaye Yamamoto, Rudolfo Anaya, John Okada, Richard Vasquez, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Silko, and J. L. Navarro. In keeping with the New Western mission, these writers articulated the hardships and experiences of their cultures in a wider American context. Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a stunning illustration of the development of both of these patterns. Ishmael Reed is one of the most important African-American writers of the post-war period. Throughout his work, he challenges dominant cultural assumptions, assumptions which he believes excludes minorities.
eBook - PDFBooks and Beyond
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading [4 volumes]
- Kenneth Womack(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Greenwood(Publisher)
Contexts and Issues. A basic assumption among cultural critics when approaching any work of fiction is that the work truly reflects the era and culture in which it is written, rather than the culture of the fictional setting. A Western, for instance, is never about the old West. It is always about the culture of the time it was written. As we look back at Westerns of the twentieth century we can see how they responded to such historical events as the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the Women’s Movement. Westerns written during World War II might emphasize savage warfare with Native Americans, for instance, as a way of reflecting upon the savage combat with the Japanese. So to what current developments do Westerns written since 2000 relate? The beginning of the twenty-first century saw the most aggressive direct attack on the United States in recent history with the September 11, 2001 attacks. A war with seemingly no end in sight with Iraq has occupied the U.S. military since 2002. Though these events have certainly impacted American culture, it is too early to determine how they will be reflected in Westerns. Other potential cultural trends that may appear in upcoming Westerns include stories about invasions from our neighbors to the south or the onslaught of alien peoples into a domesticated terri- tory. We might see savage warfare stories again as well as stories with tyrannical powerful leaders. There is no doubt that Westerns will change in the twenty-first century, but exactly what trends will emerge is yet to be seen. Reception. As with all popular media since 2000, the popular Western market depends heavily on Internet visibility. Virtually all writers have their own Web sites for their fans, and publishers devote web space to their Western products. Several WESTERN LITERATURE 1135 writers such as William W. Johnstone have long-running discussion boards for their fans to chat about their novels.
- Gary Totten(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Such revisionist turns were influential enough that in 1991, the National Museum of American Art mounted an exhibition titled The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, which featured well-known pieces as representations of the violence of empire rather than its celebration. This was not uncontroversial—indeed, two Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee sought to cut funding to the Smithsonian Institution on the grounds that the exhibit had a polit- icized agenda (Kimmelman, 1991). The mythologized West clearly remained a powerful touch- stone in American culture, irrespective of credible scholarship and the counter-discourses of Native Americans and other groups disenfranchised by US imperialism. Even US academics were not immune to the persuasive power of Western fantasies, which they at some turns took up as a subject of study and at others participated in. Despite earlier work such as Kolodny’s, in the 1990s, literary studies of the US West were still seen by some as behind the curve in respect to the New Western History. In 1998, critic Blake Allmendinger somewhat infamously wrote that “the leading journal in the field [of Western literary studies] exists in a time warp,” failing to attend to the work of women, sexual and religious minorities, and people of color (Allmendinger, 1998, p. 5). While this claim was perhaps the most provoc- ative, Allmendinger’s text was only one of many that marked an important turning point in the study of Western literatures. Feminist and ethnic studies injected the field with new vibrancy in books such as Krista Comer’s Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing (1999). In the wake of such publications, literary studies have done far more to push beyond the boundaries of genre fiction and regionalism. Recent literary criticism invites readers to recognize the West and its literatures as multiethnic, urban, and embedded in global networks.
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