This collection of ground-breaking articles examines problems romance presents in the American Western. Looking a range of films, this book offers readers important and challenging insights into the complicated nature of love and the versatile frontier narrative that address key social, political, and ethical components of the Western genre.

Responsible for some of the greatest films of the 20th century--The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Quiet Man among others--John Ford was best known for motion pictures that defined the American West and the face of wartime military. A Hollywood celebrity, Ford lived his life against the background that Twentieth Century-Fox fashioned for him. As he did, the facts of his life merged with--and became inseparable from--his multifaceted legend, fostered by Hollywood's studio culture and his own imagination. In The Westerns and War Films of John Ford Sue Matheson offers an...

As the Western matured, women's roles became more complex and modern transmitting a subtle cultural coding about the nature of westward expansionism, heroism, family life, manliness and American femininity. In Women in the Western, a range of international scholars explores the changing roles of women in the genre through case studies of classic films like Broken Arrow (1950) and The Searchers (1956), and contemporary films and TV series like Wind River (2017) and Justified (2010 15). Considering traditional and intertextual representations of women in the Western, the book charts the...