Weird Westerns

Race, Gender, Genre

Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, Sara L. Spurgeon

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496221742
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

2021 Top Ten Finalist for the Locus Awards in Nonfiction
Joshua Smith's chapter "Uncle Tom's Cabin Showdown" won the 2021 Don D. Walker Prize from the Western Literature Association Weird Westerns is an exploration of the hybrid western genre—an increasingly popular and visible form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, and conventions with elements drawn from other genres, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Despite frequent declarations of the western's death, the genre is now defined in part by its zombie-like ability to survive in American popular culture in weird, reanimated, and reassembled forms. The essays in Weird Westerns analyze a wide range of texts, including those by Native American authors Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) and William Sanders (Cherokee); the cult television series Firefly and The Walking Dead; the mainstream feature films Suicide Squad and Django Unchained; the avant-garde and bizarre fiction of Joe R. Lansdale; the tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands: The Weird West; and the comic book series Wynonna Earp. The essays explore how these weird westerns challenge conventional representations by destabilizing or subverting the centrality of the heterosexual, white, male hero but also often surprisingly reinforce existing paradigms in their inability to imagine an existence outside of colonial frameworks.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1
• 1. Attack of the Monstrous Vegetable
• 2. Strange Country
• 3. A Selective History
• Part 2
• 4. Mongrel Transmotion
• 5. Indianizing the Western
• 6. Magnificence and Metas in Professional Westerns
• Part 3
• 7. Defamiliarizing the Western on the Extraterrestrial Frontier
• 8. Shining the Light of Civilization
• 9. Racial Metaphors and Vanishing indians in Wynonna Earp, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Emma Bull’s Territory
• Part 4
• 10. The Mad Black Woman in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower
• 11. Uncle Tom’s Cabin Showdown
• 12. Race and Gender in the Time Travel Western
• Part 5
• 13. Go West, Old Man
• 14. AMC's The Walking Dead and the Restructuring of Gender and Race on the Neofrontier
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index
• About Kerry Fine
• About Michael K. Johnson
• About Rebecca M. Lush
• About Sara L. Spurgeon
• Series List