Author: Joel Deshaye
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781773852676
Category : Canada, Western
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary phenomenon. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.
Author: Arnold E. Davidson
Publisher: Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
For most North Americans--Canadians as well as Americans--the term "Western" evokes images of the frontier, brave sheriffs and ruthless outlaws, good cowboys and bad Indians. As Arnold E. Davidson shows in this groundbreaking study, a number of Canada's most interesting and experimental Western writers parody, reverse, or otherwise defuse the paraphernalia of the classic U.S. Western. Lacking both a real and imagined frontier--Canadian settlers rode trains into the new territory, already policed by Mounties--the writers of Canadian Westerns were set a different task from their American counterparts and were subsequently freed to create some of the most complex and engrossing fiction yet produced in Canada. Davidson details the evolution of the U.S. and Canadian Western forms, tracing the divergence between the two as Canadian writers responded to their unique historical circumstances by reinventing the West as well as the Western and establishing a new literary landscape where author and reader could work out new possibilities of being. Surveying a range of texts by Canada's most innovative writers, with special attention to women writers and Native stories of Coyote, he provides close readings of novels by Howard O'Hagan, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, Aritha van Herk, Anne Cameron, Peter Such, W. O. Mitchell, Beatrice Culleton, and Thomas King. A unique study, Coyote Country offers at one and the same time a theory of Canadian Western fiction, a history of crosscultural paradigms of the West as manifested in novels, and an intensive reading of some of Canada's best literature.
Author: Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000092836
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
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: Western Literature Association (U.S.)
Publisher: TCU Press
ISBN: 9780875650210
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 1408
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Book Description
Literary histories, of course, do not have a reason for being unless there exists the literature itself. This volume, perhaps more than others of its kind, is an expression of appreciation for the talented and dedicated literary artists who ignored the odds, avoided temptations to write for popularity or prestige, and chose to write honestly about the American West, believing that experiences long knowns to be of historical importance are also experiences that need and deserve a literature of importance.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004525300
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
This groundbreaking collection of essays shows how the American Western has been reimagined in different national contexts, producing fictions that interrogate, reframe, and remix the genre in unexpectedly critical ways.
Author: Camille R. La Bossière
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
ISBN: 0776603604
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Context North America is a comparative study of Canadian and American literary relations that emphasizes the cultural and institutional contexts in which Canadian literature is taught and read. This volume exemplifies the question of how the literatures of Canada might aptly be studied and contextualized in the days of heightened discontinuity and increasingly ambiguous borderlines both between and within the many narratives that make up North America. Published in English.
Author: Andrew Patrick Nelson
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 081089257X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Though one of the most popular genres for decades, the western started to lose its relevance in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the early 1980s it had ridden into the sunset on screens both big and small. The genre has enjoyed a resurgence, however, and in the past few decades some remarkable westerns have appeared on television and in movie theaters. From independent films to critically acclaimed Hollywood productions and television series, the western remains an important part of American popular culture. Running the gamut from traditional to revisionist, with settings ranging from the old West to the “new Wests” of the present day and distant future, contemporary westerns continue to explore the history, geography, myths, and legends of the American frontier. In Contemporary Westerns: Film and Television since 1990, Andrew P. Nelson has collected essays that examine the trends and transformations in this underexplored period in Western film and television history. Addressing the new Western, they argue for the continued relevance and vibrancy of the genre as a narrative form. The book is organized into two sections: “Old West, New Stories” examines Westerns with common frontier locales, such as Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Deadwood, and True Grit. “New Wests, Old Stories” explores works in which familiar Western narratives, characters, and values are represented in more modern—and in one case futuristic—settings. Included are the films No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, as well as the shows Firefly and Justified. With a foreword by Edward Buscombe, as well as an introduction that provides a comprehensive overview, this volume offers readers a compelling argument for the healthy survival of the Western. Written for scholars as well as educated viewers, Contemporary Westerns explores the genre’s evolving relationship with American culture, history, and politics.
Author: Robert McGill
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773551581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
How a war Canada did not fight profoundly changed the nation's writing and identity.
Author: Lee Clark Mitchell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226532356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films such as STAGECOACH to spaghetti Westerns like A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, culture scholar Lee Clark Mitchell shows how Westerns as a genre helped assuage a series of crises in American culture by responding to fears and obsessions of its audience--particularly what it means to be a "man". 30 photos. 5 line drawings.
Author: James Dorson
Publisher: Campus Verlag
ISBN: 3593433834
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Counternarrative Possibilities reads Cormac McCarthy's Westerns against the backdrop of two formative tropes in American mythology: virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after '9/11' ). Looking at McCarthy's Westerns in the context of American Studies, James Dorson shows how his novels counter the national narratives underlying these tropes and reinvest them with new, potentially transformative meaning. Departing from prevailing accounts of McCarthy that place him in relation to his literary antecedents, Counternarrative Possibilities takes a forwardlooking approach that reads McCarthy's work as a key influence on millennial fiction. Weaving together disciplinary history with longstanding debates over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book is at once an exploration of the limits of ideology critique in the twenty-first century and an original reconsideration of McCarthy's work 'after postmodernism'.
