Westerns

Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, Mitchell shows how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture, including debates and nationalism, suffragetism, the White Slave Trade, liberal social policy, even Dr. Spock. At the same time, Westerns have addressed issues of masculinity by setting them against various backdrops: gender (women), maturation (sons), honor (violence, restraint), and self-transformation (the West itself). Mitchell argues, for instance, that Westerns repeatedly depict men being punished as pretext for allowing them to recover, restoring themselves once again to full manhood. In Westerns, a man must continually work at being a man. . The most extensive study of Westerns to appear in twenty-five years, Mitchell's book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the genre as well as for students of film, masculinity, and American Studies.

First sentence: A curious sense of disproportion is evoked by any listing of luminaries who loved Westerns, as if that were the sole common denominator among such different lives: Richard Nixon, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Stalin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean Cocteau, Sherwood Anderson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Simone de Beauvoir, Douglas MacArthur, Akira Kurosawa.

Year

1996

Language

English

Publisher

University Of Chicago Press

Editions

2

Pages

348

ISBN

9780226532356

Data source: Wikidata