Dirty Words in Deadwood

Dirty Words in Deadwood PDF Author: Melody Graulich
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496210484
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Dirty Words in "Deadwood" showcases literary analyses of the Deadwood television series by leading western American literary critics. Whereas previous reaction to the series has largely addressed the question of historical accuracy rather than intertextuality or literary complexity, Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi's edited volume brings a much-needed perspective to Deadwood's representation of the frontier West. As Graulich observes in her introduction: "With its emotional coherence, compelling characterizations, compressed structural brilliance, moral ambiguity, language experiments, interpretation of the past, relevance to the present, and engagement with its literary forebears, Deadwood is an aesthetic triumph as historical fiction and, like much great literature, makes a case for the humanistic value of storytelling." From previously unpublished interviews with series creator David Milch to explorations of sexuality, disability, cinematic technique, and western narrative, this collection focuses on Deadwood as a series ultimately about the imagination, as a verbal and visual construct, and as a literary masterpiece that richly rewards close analysis and interpretation.

Dirty Words in Deadwood

Dirty Words in Deadwood PDF Author: Melody Graulich
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496210484
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Get Book

Book Description
Dirty Words in "Deadwood" showcases literary analyses of the Deadwood television series by leading western American literary critics. Whereas previous reaction to the series has largely addressed the question of historical accuracy rather than intertextuality or literary complexity, Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi's edited volume brings a much-needed perspective to Deadwood's representation of the frontier West. As Graulich observes in her introduction: "With its emotional coherence, compelling characterizations, compressed structural brilliance, moral ambiguity, language experiments, interpretation of the past, relevance to the present, and engagement with its literary forebears, Deadwood is an aesthetic triumph as historical fiction and, like much great literature, makes a case for the humanistic value of storytelling." From previously unpublished interviews with series creator David Milch to explorations of sexuality, disability, cinematic technique, and western narrative, this collection focuses on Deadwood as a series ultimately about the imagination, as a verbal and visual construct, and as a literary masterpiece that richly rewards close analysis and interpretation.

Deadwood and Shakespeare

Deadwood and Shakespeare PDF Author: Susan Cosby Ronnenberg
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147663095X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Set in politically unstable environments, Shakespeare’s history plays—Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV and Henry V—and HBO’s Western series Deadwood (2004–2006) all stand as critiques of myths of national origin, the sanitized stories we tell ourselves about how power imposes order on chaos. Drawing parallels between the Shakespeare plays and Deadwood, the author explores questions about legitimate political authority, the qualities of an effective leader, gender roles and community, and the reciprocal relationship between past and present in historical narratives.

Calamity Jane

Calamity Jane PDF Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080615263X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This exhaustive bibliographical reference will be the first stop for anyone looking for Calamity Jane in print, film, or photograph—and wanting to know how reliable those sources may be. Richard W. Etulain, renowned western-U.S. historian and the author of a recent biography of this charismatic figure, enumerates and assesses the most valuable sources on Calamity Jane’s life and legend in newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and movies, as well as historical and government archives. Etulain begins with a brief biography of Martha Canary, aka Calamity Jane (1856–1903), then analyzes the origins and growth of her legends. The sources, Etulain shows, reveal three versions of Calamity Jane. In the most popular one, she was a Wild Woman of the Old West who helped push a roaring frontier through its final stages. This is the Calamity Jane who fought Indians, marched with the military, and took on the bad guys. Early in her life she also hoped to embody the pioneer woman, seeking marriage and a stable family and home. A third, later version made of Calamity an angel of mercy who reached out to the poor and nursed smallpox victims no one else would help. The hyperbolic journalism of the Old West, as well as dime novels and the stretchers Calamity herself told in her interviews and autobiography, shaped her legends through much of the twentieth century. Many of the sensational early accounts of Calamity’s life, Etulain notes, were based on rumor and hearsay. In illuminating the role of the Deadwood Dick dime novel series and other pulp fiction in shaping what we know—or think we know—of the American West, Etulain underscores one of his fascinating themes: the power of popular culture. The product of twenty years’ labor sifting fact from falsehood or distortion, this bibliography and reader’s guide includes brief discussions of nearly every item’s contents, along with a terse, entertaining evaluation of its reliability.

Imagining Wild Bill

Imagining Wild Bill PDF Author: Paul Ashdown
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809337894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Wild Bill’s ever-evolving legend When it came to the Wild West, the nineteenth-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok’s story was no exception. Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive. Rather than attempt to tease truth from fiction, coauthors Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill investigate the ways in which Hickok embodied the culture of glamorized violence Americans embraced after the Civil War and examine the process of how his story emerged, evolved, and turned into a viral multimedia sensation full of the excitement, danger, and romance of the West. Journalists, the coauthors demonstrate, invented “Wild Bill” Hickok, glorifying him as a civilizer. They inflated his body count and constructed his legend in the midst of an emerging celebrity culture that grew up around penny newspapers. His death by treachery, at a relatively young age, made the story tragic, and dime-store novelists took over where the press left off. Reimagined as entertainment, Hickok’s legend continued to enthrall Americans in literature, on radio, on television, and in the movies, and it still draws tourists to notorious Deadwood, South Dakota. American culture often embraces myths that later become accepted as popular history. By investigating the allure and power of Hickok’s myth, Ashdown and Caudill explain how American journalism and popular culture have shaped the way Civil War–era figures are remembered and reveal how Americans have embraced violence as entertainment.

Deadwood

Deadwood PDF Author: Pete Dexter
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804151911
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
DEADWOOD, DAKOTA TERRITORIES, 1876: Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepeneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real wild west, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.

Critical Perspectives on the Western

Critical Perspectives on the Western PDF Author: Lee Broughton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442272430
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
For decades, the Western film has been considered a dying breed of cinema, yet filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Ethan and Joel Coen find new ways to reinvigorate the genre. As Westerns continue to be produced for contemporary audiences, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the relevance of this enduring genre. In Critical Perspectives on the Western: From A Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained, Lee Broughton has compiled a wide-ranging collection of essays that look at various forms of the genre, on both the large and small screen. Contributors to this volume consider themes and subgenres, celebrities and authors, recent idiosyncratic engagements with the genre, and the international Western. These essays also explore issues of race and gender in the various films discussed as well as within the film genre as a whole. Among the films and television programs discussed in this volume are The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford; Django Kill; Justified; Meek’s Cutoff; Tears of the Black Tiger; Appaloosa; The Frozen Limits; and Red Harvest.Featuring a diverse selection of chapters that represent current thinking on the Western. Critical Perspectives on the Western will appeal to fans of the genre, film students, and scholars alike.

Capitalism, Crime and Media in the 21st Century

Capitalism, Crime and Media in the 21st Century PDF Author: Neil Ewen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030564444
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This edited collection from leading scholars in the fields of media, communications, cultural studies and a number of aligned areas looks to the intersection of capitalism, crime and the media. The text is founded on the principles of cultural criminology – that how we determine and understand crime lies in the social world and that the determination of crime and its mediation in popular culture have a political basis. The book consists of eleven chapters and is divided into three sections. Section one considers the intersection of crime and capitalism in a range of contemporary cultural texts. Section two examines how various power systems influence the operation of the media in its role of reporting crime and holding the powerful to account. Section three considers how texts in a variety of formats are used to conduct politics, communicate politics and enact political decision making.

Calamity

Calamity PDF Author: Karen Jones
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300212801
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
A fascinating new account of the life and legend of the Wild West's most notorious woman: Calamity Jane Martha Jane Canary, popularly known as Calamity Jane, was the pistol-packing, rootin' tootin' "lady wildcat" of the American West. Brave and resourceful, she held her own with the men of America's most colorful era and became a celebrity both in her own right and through her association with the likes of Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody. In this engaging account, Karen Jones takes a fresh look at the story of this iconic frontierswoman. She pieces together what is known of Canary's life and shows how a rough and itinerant lifestyle paved the way for the scattergun, alcohol-fueled heroics that dominated Canary's career. Spanning Canary's rise from humble origins to her role as "heroine of the plains" and the embellishment of her image over subsequent decades, Jones shows her to be feisty, eccentric, transgressive--and very much complicit in the making of the myth that was Calamity Jane.

The Last Western

The Last Western PDF Author: Paul Stasi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441151141
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of shows in HBO's recent history, Deadwood has surprisingly little coverage in our current scholarship. Grounding contemporary anxieties about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in its nineteenth-century setting, Deadwood revises our understanding of a formative period for the American nation through a re-examination of one of the main genres through which this national story has been transmitted: the Western. With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America.

Uncanny Fidelity

Uncanny Fidelity PDF Author: James Newlin
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361154
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
"In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as "faithful" or "unfaithful" to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin broadens the scope of fidelity beyond its familiar concerns of plot and language. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's model of the Uncanny-the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity-this book focuses on films and series that do not selfidentify as adaptations of Shakespeare, but which invoke lost, even troubling aspects of the original. In doing so, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can clarify both the historical context of his drama and its relevance for the current political moment. Modeling his new approach to the critical category of fidelity, Newlin closely examines four twentieth-century films and tv series next to their Shakespearean counterparts within the contexts of their casting, genre, and reception. When a director of an unconventional version of The Tempest, for example, chooses to cast a white man as either Caliban or Miranda, they seemingly depart from Shakespeare's original text. Yet with these casting decisions, Newlin argues that The Master (2012) and Brigsby Bear (2017) eerily recall the realities of the early modern theater. The Master unexpectedly depicts something like the mythic "wild man" figure that informed The Tempest's early-colonial context, while Brigsby Bear invokes the exploitative, abusive treatment of boy-actors cast in female roles on the renaissance stage. Similarly, by not explicitly identifying as an adaptation of Othello, the cult comedy series Vice Principals (2016-17) frees itself to more faithfully capture the play's early modern comic context - while also illuminating the parallels between racist discourse in Shakespeare's age and our own. By reading these works as uncannily faithful adaptations, Newlin articulates something like the original response of Shakespeare's audience. Finally, Newlin demonstrates how a filmed adaptation might itself intervene in Shakespeare's critical reception. As a version of The Winter's Tale that ends tragically, the celebrated film Manchester By The Sea (2016) effectively rebuts Stanley Cavell's celebrated reading of Shakespeare's romance. Recognizing the parallels between Manchester By The Sea and The Winter's Tale, Newlin argues that Shakespeare views grief and guilt as forms of certainty - in contradistinction to Cavell's reading of the play as a portrait of skepticism. The first extended treatment of adaptation as a form of uncanny return, Uncanny Fidelity offers students and scholars of Shakespeare in film, adaptation studies, film studies, and psychoanalytic theory a critical framework to further engage the matter of personal response with deeper theoretical rigor. In redefining what constitutes adaptation, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can radically challenge our own conception of what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean"--