Unsettling The Literary West

Author : Nathaniel Lewis
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2003-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0803229380

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Unsettling the Literary West by Nathaniel Lewis Pdf

The test of western literature has invariably been Is it real? Is it accurate? Authentic? The result is a standard anything but literary, as Nathaniel Lewis observes in this ambitious work, a wholesale rethinking of the critical terms and contexts?and thus of the very nature?of western writing. ø Why is western writing virtually missing from the American literary canon but a frequent success in the marketplace? The skewed status of western literature, Lewis contends, can be directly attributed to the strategies of the region?s writers, and these strategies depend consistently on the claim of authenticity. A perusal of western American authorship reveals how these writers effectively present themselves as accurate and reliable recorders of real places, histories, and cultures?but not as stylists or inventors. The imaginative qualities of this literature are thus obscured in the name of authentic reproduction. Through a study of a set of western authors and their relationships to literary and cultural history, Lewis offers a reconsideration of the deceptive and often undervalued history of western American literature. ø With unequivocal admiration for the literature under scrutiny, Lewis exposes the potential for startling new readings once western writing is freed from its insistence on a questionable authenticity. His book sets out a broader system of inquiry that points writers and critics of western literature in the direction of a new and truly sustaining literary tradition.

Author : William R. Handley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2002-08-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781139440158

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Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West by William R. Handley Pdf

In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.

Author : Steven Frye
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2016-04-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107095373

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The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American West by Steven Frye Pdf

This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.

Author : Roewan Crowe
Publisher : Arp Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 1894037901

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Quivering Land by Roewan Crowe Pdf

Roewan Crowe's compelling and haunting literary debut, Quivering Land, is a rather queer Western, engaging with poetics and politics to reckon with the legacies of violence and colonization in the West. Written in a sparse style, this lonely, sometimes brutal book invites the reader on a powerful journey with Clem, Violet, and a dead girl in a red dress. Clem, a lone cowboy, caught in the inevitable violence of the Western, compulsively rides through ghost towns and Monument Valley. Violet is an artist who pulls dead bodies, guns, and memory into her studio, immersing herself in a creative process, seeking to understand the relationships among aggression, vulnerability and the imagination. Disrupting the story are the ghostly visitations of a dead child who travels the western landscape unsettling romanticized, filmic images of Monument Valley. Interspersed in the text are fragile, beautiful images painstakingly cut from paper, created by artist Paul Robles. This experimental long poem, a gritty feminist meditation on trauma, violence and the possibilities of art, is as powerful as a Smith and Wesson Schofield rifle.

Author : Nicolas S. Witschi
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 582 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2014-02-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781118652510

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A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West by Nicolas S. Witschi Pdf

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies

Author : Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2020-05-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000092837

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The New American West in Literature and the Arts by Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo Pdf

The story of the American West is that of a journey. It is the story of a movement, of a geographical and human transition, of the delineation of a route that would soon become a rooted myth. The story of the American West has similarly journeyed across boundaries, in a two-way movement, sometimes feeding the idea of that myth, sometimes challenging it. This collection of essays relates to the notion of the traveling essence of the myth of the American West from different geographical and disciplinary standpoints. The volume originates in Europe, in Spain, where the myth traveled, was received, assimilated, and re-presented. It intends to travel back to the West, in a two-way cross-cultural journey, which will hopefully contribute to the delineation of the New—always self-renewing—American West. It includes the work of authors of both sides of the Atlantic ocean who propose a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary dialogue upon the idea, the geography and the representation of the American West.

Author : Brady Harrison,Randi Lynn Tanglen
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2020-06
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781496221292

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Teaching Western American Literature by Brady Harrison,Randi Lynn Tanglen Pdf

In this volume experienced and new college- and university-level teachers will find practical, adaptable strategies for designing or updating courses in western American literature and western studies. Teaching Western American Literature features the latest developments in western literary research and cultural studies as well as pedagogical best practices in course development. Contributors provide practical models and suggestions for courses and assignments while presenting concrete strategies for teaching works both inside and outside the canon. In addition, Brady Harrison and Randi Lynn Tanglen have assembled insights from pioneering western studies instructors with workable strategies and practical advice for translating this often complex material for classrooms from freshman writing courses to graduate seminars. Teaching Western American Literature reflects the cutting edge of western American literary study, featuring diverse approaches allied with women’s, gender, queer, environmental, disability, and Indigenous studies and providing instructors with entrée into classrooms of leading scholars in the field.

Author : Stephen J. Mexal
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2020-04-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781496211347

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Reading for Liberalism by Stephen J. Mexal Pdf

Founded in 1868, the Overland Monthly was a San Francisco–based literary magazine whose mix of humor, pathos, and romantic nostalgia for a lost frontier was an immediate sensation on the East Coast. Due in part to a regional desire to attract settlers and financial investment, the essays and short fiction published in the Overland Monthly often portrayed the American West as a civilized evolution of, and not a savage regression from, eastern bourgeois modernity and democracy. Stories about the American West have for centuries been integral to the way we imagine freedom, the individual, and the possibility for alternate political realities. Reading for Liberalism examines the shifting literary and narrative construction of liberal selfhood in California in the late nineteenth century through case studies of a number of western American writers who wrote for the Overland Monthly, including Noah Brooks, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Jack London, John Muir, and Frank Norris, among others. Reading for Liberalism argues that Harte, the magazine’s founding editor, and the other members of the Overland group critiqued and reimagined the often invisible fabric of American freedom. Reading for Liberalism uncovers and examines in the text of the Overland Monthly the relationship between wilderness, literature, race, and the production of individual freedom in late nineteenth-century California.

Author : Amy T. Hamilton,Tom J. Hillard
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2014-11-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780803254893

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Before the West Was West by Amy T. Hamilton,Tom J. Hillard Pdf

Before the West Was West examines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 “western” texts and asks what we mean by “western” American literature in the first place and when that designation originated. Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the “American West” in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s, Before the West Was West explores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and the Pony Express, these thirteen essays demonstrate that no single, unified idea or geography defines the American West. Contributors investigate texts ranging from the Norse Vinland Sagas and Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative to early Spanish and French exploration narratives, an eighteenth-century English novel, and a play by Aphra Behn. Through its examination of the disparate and multifaceted body of literature that arises from a broad array of cultural backgrounds and influences, Before the West Was West apprehends the literary West in temporal as well as spatial and cultural terms and poses new questions about “westernness” and its literary representation.

Author : William R. Handley,Nathaniel Lewis
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2007-05-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 080325976X

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True West by William R. Handley,Nathaniel Lewis Pdf

In no other region of the United States has the notion of authenticity played such an important yet elusive role as it has in the West. Though pervasive in literature,øpopular culture, and history, assumptions about western authenticity have not received adequate critical attention. Given the ongoing economic and social transformations in this vast region, the persistent nostalgia and desire for the ?real? authentic West suggest regional and national identities at odds with themselves. True West explores the concept of authenticity as it is used to invent, test, advertise, and read the West. The fifteen essays collected here apply contemporary critical and cultural theory to western literary history, Native American literature and identities, the visual West, and the imagining of place. Ranging geographically from the Canadian Prairies to Buena Park?s Entertainment Corridor in Southern California, and chronologically from early tourist narratives to contemporary environmental writing, True West challenges many assumptions we make about western writing and opens the door to an important new chapter in western literary history and cultural criticism.

Author : Paul Lauter
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 704 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2020-09-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781119685654

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A Companion to American Literature and Culture by Paul Lauter Pdf

This expansive Companion offers a set of fresh perspectives on the wealth of texts produced in and around what is now the United States. Highlights the diverse voices that constitute American literature, embracing oral traditions, slave narratives, regional writing, literature of the environment, and more Demonstrates that American literature was multicultural before Europeans arrived on the continent, and even more so thereafter Offers three distinct paradigms for thinking about American literature, focusing on: genealogies of American literary study; writers and issues; and contemporary theories and practices Enables students and researchers to generate richer, more varied and more comprehensive readings of American literature

Author : Mark Fiege,Leisl Carr Childers,Michael J. Lansing
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2024
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781496236173

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Wallace Stegner's Unsettled Country by Mark Fiege,Leisl Carr Childers,Michael J. Lansing Pdf

This collection shows that Wallace Stegner's work, however flawed, remains a useful tool for assessing the past, present, and future of the American West.

Author : John George Jury
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2024-05-17
Category : Electronic
ISBN : LCCN:07028787

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The Literary West by John George Jury Pdf

Author : Arthur Manuel,Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson
Publisher : Between the Lines
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2021-11-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781771135573

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Unsettling Canada by Arthur Manuel,Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson Pdf

A Canadian bestseller and winner of the 2016 Canadian Historical Association Aboriginal History Book Prize, Unsettling Canada is a landmark text built on a unique collaboration between two First Nations leaders. Arthur Manuel (1951–2017) was one of the most forceful advocates for Indigenous title and rights in Canada; Grand Chief Ron Derrickson, one of the most successful Indigenous businessmen in the country. Together, they bring a fresh perspective and bold new ideas to Canada’s most glaring piece of unfinished business: the place of Indigenous peoples within the country’s political and economic space. This vital second edition features a foreword by award-winning activist Naomi Klein and an all-new chapter co-authored by Law professor Nicole Schabus and Manuel’s daughter, Kanahus, honouring the multi-generational legacy of the Manuel family’s work.

Author : Blake Allmendinger
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2021-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781496226921

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Geographic Personas by Blake Allmendinger Pdf

During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the American West underwent a series of transformations, certain pivotal figures also undertook a process of self-transformation. Geographic Personas reveals a practice of public performance, impersonation, deception, and fraud, exposing the secret lives of men and women who capitalized on changes occurring in the region. These changes affected the arts; land ownership; scientific exploration; definitions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and relations between the United States and other countries throughout the world. In addition to well-known figures such as Clarence King and Willa Cather, Geographic Personas examines lesser-known players in the performative process of westward expansion, including Isadora Duncan, the founder of modern American dance; Polish actress Helena Modjeska; Adolf Hitler’s favorite author, Karl May; Japanese poet Yone Noguchi; Sylvester Long, a mixed-race star of Native American silent films whose mother was born into slavery; and the perpetrator of the greatest land grant hoax in U.S. history. While scholars have written about the environmental, demographic, and economic changes that occurred in the West during the nineteenth century, Allmendinger adds a crucial piece to this dialogue. He brings to light the experiences of artists, dancers, film stars, con men, and criminals in stories of self-transformation that are often sad, tragic, and poignant.