Western Novels

5 Key excerpts on "Western Novels"

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  Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists

  American Fiction after Postmodernism

  • Robert Rebein(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  4 Seen from this perspective, contemporary western writing springs, at least in part, from a concern with place.

  If the literature of the Old West, essentially about conquest, begins in the fine memoirs and autobiographies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—books like Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) , Charles A. Siringo’s A Texas Cowboy (1885), Andy Adams’s The Log of a Cowboy (1903) and Teddy “Blue” Abbott’s We Pointed Them North (1939)—the literature of the New West, about survival and preservation, begins in such haunting, poetic works of nonfiction as Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky (1978), Gretel Erhlich’s Solace of Open Spaces (1985), and William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (1991). In these works and others like them, the western landscape is the first thing brought to life. The world of Doig’s book starts, quite precisely, along the “south fork of Sixteenmile Creek,” under “the fir-dark flanks of Hatfield Mountain,” far back “among the high spilling slopes of the Bridger Range of southeastern Montana.” Out of this exact and exacting environment Doig spins a story of a family half at odds and half in harmony with the elements. Gretel Ehrlich begins her book five days out in the Badlands of Wyoming, a hailstorm coming on, proceeding from there to consider how living and working in such a place, with its hundred mile views, “is to lose the distinction between foreground and background.” William Least Heat-Moon begins his monumental work, the Moby-Dick of all writing about place, at sundown in the middle of the Flint Hills of Kansas—where the West itself begins—“in quest of the land and what informs it.”5

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  Reading the American Novel 1780 - 1865

  • Shirley Samuels(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1

  Introduction to the American Novel

  From Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic Novels to Caroline Kirkland’s Wilderness

  The practice of writing fiction in the United States developed along with the nation.1 Like the nation, the form of the novel adjusted its boundaries and expanded to make sometimes audacious claims on neighboring territories. Like the nation, the novel encompassed practices that, in hindsight, sometimes seem heroic – such as the struggle against slavery in the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe – and sometimes seem embarrassing. Stowe’s fiction (notably Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1852], perhaps the bestselling novel of the nineteenth-century United States) can engage the reader with what then might have appeared as picturesque dialect and now can look like racist caricatures. The very popular frontier fiction of James Fenimore Cooper now appears as an uneasy justification for the atrocities of border warfare. The ambivalence with which a twenty-first-century reader must regard the many political decisions affecting the history of the nineteenth-century United States frequently makes for difficulties in reading the nineteenth-century novel. Fictional practices often engaged readers (and citizens) in supporting the separation of gendered spheres of action as well as defending decisions such as the extension of slavery into new territories and the removal of sovereignty from the Cherokee nation.

  As well as encountering such a changed political climate, the expectations of a twenty-first-century reader might meet many practical interpretive obstacles. Often the attention to details that a reader brought to bear in the nineteenth century included assumptions about shared references – including Shakespeare plays, biblical citations, and sentimental poetry – that are rarely as easily available for readers in the twenty-first century. That set of assumptions tends to permeate narrative address for much of the first half of the century, but throughout the century authors felt it necessary to address their readers and to inform them about the designs that they had on readers’ politics, sympathies, and morals. Such moral and emotional claims may now appear to belong to a premodern era, one difficult for readers to re-inhabit. A primary goal of this book is to suggest a way to read such fiction as a richly textured enterprise, one replete with satisfactions both literary and cultural.

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  Hollywood Utopia

  Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema

  • Patrick Brereton(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Intellect Books

    (Publisher)

  To foreground these debates through representations in Hollywood, it is fruitful to trace some of the many cross connections between the primary American genre of the western and the more recent genre of the road movie. As a genre, the western is based around the opening up of the American frontier and is thematically preoccupied with the general ideological and symbolic transformation of the ‘desert’ into the ‘garden’ in a tension between ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ values, often dramatised by legal struggles over property and possession. The western narrative embodied travel through landscape in an attempt to create a new American template for civilisation. But while the western heroes rode their horses and wagons and later used railways to traverse the ‘barren’ inhospitable landscape, road movies often emulated and sometimes reversed this imperialist linear movement.

  John Ford embodies this western ideal. In his extensive use of Monument Valley he recognised in nature the true romantic spirit of adventure. Out there, men could ‘be themselves’ and act out their true masculine selves. This remains a central thematic trope in many of his films, within the constraints of what can be described as ‘feminine’ social values. These values tend to be defined negatively, as the need to curb individual freedom and encourage settlement within a prescribed quotient of laws and controls, which are continually being imposed. Ford particularly focused on proud male behaviour and how it reflected the ever-present revenge narrative. Outsiders like John Wayne were needed to protect the newly-developing communities from selfish greed and sometimes downright evil, which was forever lurking in the background. But the hero’s unwillingness to submit to societal norms meant he was compelled to journey back into the wilderness/desert where he could again become a free agent within nature.

  Alongside human agency, the desert in the typical (Fordian) western is also rarely devoid of ideological significance or empty of meaning. Romantics, as discussed earlier, have always looked to landscape to gain inspiration for ‘political’ utopias. The western incorporated this aspiration in particular by addressing key political/ethical questions regarding what constitutes society and how it should be protected. This is achieved by foregrounding a few iconic, elemental symbols like the sheriff’s badge to dramatise the ‘need’ for law and order, the mise-en-scène of the saloon to dramatise the play between libidinal desire and stoic dignity, maybe even a hanging tree to symbolise the ultimate deterrent and, quite often, a barber shop to wash away the (symbolic) ‘impurity’ of outside nature. Western iconography, as found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s symbolic red letter motif in the Scarlet Letter

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  Policing the World on Screen

  American Mythologies and Hollywood's Rogue Crimefighters

  • Marilyn Yaquinto(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In such a frame, these so-called Indians are depicted either as ignoble savages who represent the devil’s fortitude or noble savages that symbolize an unspoiled wilderness, which, however virtuous, is wasteful if not made more productive (and profitable). The frontier’s white folk hero is contrasted with (and constructed in opposition to) this Indian —first encountered by New England settlers, then by frontiersmen and pioneers pushing west. Roy Harvey Pearce explains that white America had “hoped to bring [the Indian ] to civilization but saw that civilization would kill him,” or at least destroy his natural “gifts”; however troubled the American conscience was at the death of the individual, “it could make sense of his death only when it understood it as the death of a symbol.” 13 This process of dehumanizing the Other also effectively effaces the crime associated with his/her killing at the hands of American warriors, such thinking finding echoes in rhetoric linked to America’s later “frontier” conflicts both at home and abroad. This frontiersman of literature was adapted for the budding film industry that developed in the early twentieth century, and which represented the newest form of popular culture to seize the nation’s attention. More specifically, it is the cowboy, especially when armed and skilled as a gunfighter, who carries on the spirit of the western frontier as adapted for the “moving pictures.” The functions and characteristics that define the western as a genre, besides being situated in the nineteenth century frontier, also include a focus on the line between law and lawlessness, order and chaos, and civilization and nature. More often than not, in its first iterations, the western and its cowboy/ gunfighter hero represent the positive resolution of these conflicts, affirming the idea of American optimism and the progression of the West, and by extension, Western civilization

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  The New American West in Literature and the Arts

  A Journey Across Boundaries

  • Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo, Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Overall, the different texts discussed here illustrate both the consolidation of the transatlantic dimension of the American West and the fundamental role of contemporary southwestern European writers in bringing attention to the literary representation of the American West in a global context. Actually, the thematic and formal maturation of European Westerns over the last two decades often parallels the evolution of post-frontier writing in the United States, in particular, its growing departure from the overused topics and images of the formula Western. In fact, the books discussed in this chapter testify to the increasing weight of concepts such as interdependence, diversity, hybridity, and transculturation in contemporary literary portraits of the American West.

  Notes

  1 . I am indebted to the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (PGC2018–094659-B-C21), FEDER, and the Basque government (Dpto. de Educación, Universidades e Investigación / Hezkuntza, Unibertsitate eta Ikertu Saila, IT 1026–16) for funding the research carried out for this chapter.

  2 . All the quotations from Arizona are taken from the English version of its acting edition, which has not yet been published. The author of the translation is Laureano Corces.

  3 . Ironically enough, the actors playing the roles of the Anglo-American couple in an important number of performances of this play in cities such as Madrid, London, and Mexico D.F. have been two Mexican actors, Alejandro Calva and Aurora Cano.

  4 . Galician literature also includes a few examples of books set in the American West, though they were published in the late twentieth century. Thus, Xosé Fernández Ferreiro’s A morte de Frank González (Frank González’s Death, 1975) is regarded as the first Western written in Galician. A better-known book is perhaps Isidro Novo’s Por unha presa de machacantes (For a Fistful of Dollars, 1997), a comic Western that Novo wrote under the name of Isy New. There also interesting stories about the experiences of Portuguese immigrants in the American West, some of them published originally in English and others in Portuguese, but they are often twentieth-century works. For further information on these autobiographies, see Francisco Cota Fagundes 701–712.

  5 . All quotes from Barcelona Far West

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