Since the recent republication of her novel The Squatter and the Don, MarIa Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832-95) has become a key figure in the recovery of nineteenth-century Mexican American literature. An aristocratic Californiana, she championed the rights of Mexican Americans in novels, plays, and letters. Her 1885 novel called attention to the illegal appropriation of Mexican land by the United States government, and she critiqued the political mores of America after the Civil War in light of the Mexican-American war. Her keen assessment of corporate capitalism...
Since the recent republication of her novel The Squatter and the Don, MarIa Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832-95) has become a key figu...
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, popular 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...
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 pervasi...
Postwestern Cultures synthesizes the most critical topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West within a single volume. This interdisciplinary anthology features leading scholars in the varied fields of western American literary studies and includes new regional studies, global studies, studies of popular culture, environmental criticism, gender and queer theory, and multiculturalism. Postwestern Cultures, like all successful studies of western American literature, is necessarily diverse and wide-ranging; it grasps the multifaceted quality of the landscape,...
Postwestern Cultures synthesizes the most critical topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West within a single volume. This interdi...
Manifest and Other Destinies critiques Manifest Destiny's exclusive claim as an explanatory national story in order to rethink the meaning and boundaries of the West and of the United States' national identity. Stephanie LeMenager considers the American West before it became a trusted symbol of U.S. national character or a distinct literary region in the later nineteenth century, back when the West was undeniably many wests, defined by international economic networks linking diverse territories and peoples from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast. Many nineteenth-century...
Manifest and Other Destinies critiques Manifest Destiny's exclusive claim as an explanatory national story in order to rethink the meaning and ...
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. 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...
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...
Since World War II, the American West has become the nation s military arsenal, proving ground, and disposal site. Through a wide-ranging discussion of recent literature produced in and about the West, Dirty Wars explores how the region s iconic landscapes, invested with myths of national virtue, have obscured the West s crucial role in a post World War II age of permanent war. In readings of western particularly southwestern literature, John Beck provides a historically informed account of how the military-industrial economy, established to protect the United States after Pearl...
Since World War II, the American West has become the nation s military arsenal, proving ground, and disposal site. Through a wide-ranging discussion o...
Is the American West in Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns" the same American West we find in Douglas Coupland's Generation X? In Jim Jarmusch's movies? In Calexico's music? Or is the American West, as this book tells us, a constantly moving, mutating idea within a complex global culture? And what, precisely (or better yet, imprecisely) does it mean? Using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the rhizome, Neil Campbell shows how the West (or west-ness) continually breaks away from a mainstream notion of American "rootedness" and renews and transforms itself in various...
Is the American West in Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns" the same American West we find in Douglas Coupland's Generation X? In Jim Jarmusch'...
In this innovative study, Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins, John Blair Gamber examines urbanity and the results of urban living traffic, garbage, sewage, waste, and pollution arguing for a new recognition of all forms of human detritus as part of the natural world and thus for a broadening of our understanding of environmental literature.While much of the discourse surrounding the United States idealistic and nostalgic views of itself privileges clean living (primarily in rural, small-town, and suburban settings), representations of rurality and urbanity by Chicanas/Chicanos,...
In this innovative study, Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins, John Blair Gamber examines urbanity and the results of urban living traffic,...
During the post-World War II period, the Western, like America s other great film genres, appeared to collapse as a result of revisionism and the emergence of new forms. Perhaps, however, as theorists like Gilles Deleuze suggest, it remains, simply maintaining its empty frame. Yet this frame is far from empty, as Post-Westerns shows us: rather than collapse, the Western instead found a new form through which to scrutinize and question the very assumptions on which the genre was based. Employing the ideas of critics such as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Ranciere, Neil...
During the post-World War II period, the Western, like America s other great film genres, appeared to collapse as a result of revisionism and the e...
Tracing the transnational influences of what has been known as a uniquely American genre, "the Western," Susan Kollin's Captivating Westerns analyzes key moments in the history of multicultural encounters between the Middle East and the American West. In particular, the book examines how experiences of contact and conflict have played a role in defining the western United States as a crucial American landscape. Kollin interprets the popular Western as a powerful national narrative and presents the cowboy hero as a captivating figure who upholds traditional American notions of freedom and...
Tracing the transnational influences of what has been known as a uniquely American genre, "the Western," Susan Kollin's Captivating Westerns analyzes ...
