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Chapter 10 - Western Fiction

from Part II - The Politics of Genre and Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2023

Bryan M. Santin
Affiliation:
Concordia University Irvine
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Summary

This chapter suggests that the chief subject of Western genre fiction is the politics of individual freedom. Novels that take the American West as their principal setting and subject, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), Louis L’Amour’s Hondo (1953), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), along with short stories such as Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), ask questions that are fundamentally about liberalism. The chapter suggests that early genre Westerns tend to imagine the American West as a romantic space of absolute individual autonomy, whereas post-1970s Westerns reimagine the genre with a critical eye, as if to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the frontier myth was too often a cover story for conquest. Over the course of its twentieth-century invention and reinvention, one persistent feature of the Western genre was the many ways in which it positioned the signifiers of the West in order to imagine individualism in America.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Western Fiction
  • Edited by Bryan M. Santin, Concordia University Irvine
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
  • Online publication: 07 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009030274.014
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  • Western Fiction
  • Edited by Bryan M. Santin, Concordia University Irvine
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
  • Online publication: 07 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009030274.014
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Western Fiction
  • Edited by Bryan M. Santin, Concordia University Irvine
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
  • Online publication: 07 October 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009030274.014
Available formats
×