The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture

ISBN-13: 9780195072433 / Angielski / Twarda / 1992 / 216 str.

Blake Allmendinger

Opis

What are the connections between cattle branding and Christian salvation, between livestock castration and square dancing, between rustling and the making of spurs and horsehair bridles in prison, between children's coloring books and cowboy poetry as it is practiced today? The Cowboy uses literary, historical, folkloric, and pop cultural sources to document ways in which cowboys address religion, gender, economics, and literature. Arguing that cowboys are defined by the work they do, Allmendinger sets out in each chapter to investigate one form of labor (such as branding, castration, or rustling) that cowboys perform in their "work culture." He then looks at early oral poems that cowboys recited around campfires, on trail drives, at roundups, and at home in their bunkhouses, and at later poems, histories and autobiographies written by cowboys--most of which have never before been studied by scholars. He discovers that these texts not only deal with work but with larger concerns, including art, morality, spirituality, and male sexuality. In addition to spotlighting little-known texts, art, and archival sources, The Cowboy examines the works of Twain, Steinbeck, Cather, Norris, Dana, McMurtry, and others, and features more than 60 historic photographs, many of which have not been published until now.

Recenzje

In this path-breaking work, Allmendinger looks past the colorful cowboy of pulp fiction and film to investigate the equally colorful world that actual cowboys constructed for themselves. By assessing the workaday world of the cowboy with a mixture of exhaustive scholarly knowledge and intellectual brio, he reveals a set of sustaining myths to the stories, songs, and poems that cowboys themselves have written—myths by which they instilled their otherwise menial work with transcendent meaning and urgency. Branding read as skin grammar; livestock castration as a masculinizing activity; square dancing as intense moral drama; the lonesome cowboy as labor's ideal: these and other provocative insights emerge from this wonderfully innovative study—a study that not only gives us the cowboy as a serious cultural and laboring figure, but provides an interdisciplinary model in its combination of folklore, history, popular culture, and literary analysis.