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True West
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,øpopular 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 West. The fifteen essays collected here apply contemporary critical and cultural theory to western literary history, Native American literature and identities, the visual West, and the imagining of place. Ranging geographically from the Canadian Prairies to Buena Park?s Entertainment Corridor in Southern California, and chronologically from early tourist narratives to contemporary environmental writing, True West challenges many assumptions we make about western writing and opens the door to an important new chapter in western literary history and cultural criticism.
Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West
In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.
Land of Sunshine
Sigrid Anderson focuses on the Southern California magazine Land of Sunshine, a publication that featured authors such as Edith Eaton, Mary Austin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to explore how regional periodical fiction offered agency to women--and the implications for the region and its populace.
The Brokeback Book
An American Western made by a Taiwanese director and filmed in Canada, Brokeback Mountain was a global cultural phenomenon even before it became the highest grossing gay-themed drama in film history.øFew films have inspired as much passion and debate, or produced as many contradictory responses, from online homage to late-night parody. In this wide-ranging and incisive collection, writers, journalists, scholars, and ordinary viewers explore the film and Annie Proulx?s original story as well asøtheir ongoing cultural and political significance. The contributors situate Brokeback Mountain in relation to gay civil rights, the cinematic and literary Western, the Chinese value of forbearance, male melodrama, and urban and rural working lives across generations and genders. ø The Brokeback Book builds on earlier debates by novelist David Leavitt, critic Daniel Mendelsohn, producer James Schamus, and film reviewer Kenneth Turan with new and noteworthy interpretations of the Brokeback phenomenon, the film, and its legacy. Also appearing in print for the first time is Michael Silverblatt?s interview with Annie Proulx about the story she wrote and the film it became.
Regionalism and the Humanities
Although the framework of regionalist studies may seem to be crumbling under the weight of increasing globalization, this collection of seventeen essays makes clear that cultivating regionalism lies at the center of the humanist endeavor. With interdisciplinary contributions from poets and fiction writers, literary historians, musicologists, and historians of architecture, agriculture, and women, this volume implements some of the most innovative and intriguing approaches to the history and value of regionalism as a category for investigation in the humanities. In the volume’s inaugural essay, Annie Proulx discusses landscapes in American fiction, comments on how she constructs characters,...
Postwestern Cultures
Synthesizes topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West. This work examines subjects ranging from the use of frontier rhetoric in Japanese American internment camp narratives to the emergence of agricultural tourism in the New West to the application of geographer J B Jackson's theories to vernacular or abandoned western landscapes.
Critical Queer Studies
Critical Queer Studies examines contemporary films and documentaries that dramatize the intersection of law and queer life, analyzing the effects of legal doctrines-jury selection, unwanted sexual advance, negligence, hate crimes, and gay marriage-on the production and reception of queer film and fiction. Exploring the interaction of these discourses by discussing internationally-known American films, the book demonstrates how the law maintains its hold over the queer subject through promoting certain ideological fictions and conversely how film and literature draw upon the material realities of queer legal status to dramatize conflicts between law and the marginalized subject. Critical Queer Studies synthesizes queer studies, law and literature, and film studies, engaging these fields to show how the struggle for gay and lesbian rights has influenced the production of film and fiction.
John Alton
Devoted to his craft--sometimes to the detriment of his reputation--cinematographer John Alton (1901-1996) was sought after by such directors as Vincente Minnelli, Richard Brooks and Anthony Mann but was disdained by others of comparable talent. An auteur in the truest sense, Alton established a landmark body of work described by Variety film critic Todd McCarthy as "The essence, and ultimate example, of film noir ... logically created by a cinematographer, not a director." This collection of new essays by filmmakers and film scholars explores the central role Alton's distinctive style of "painting with light" played in formulating the aesthetics of noir, as well as his contributions to other genres.
In Search of the True Russia
Looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russia, surveying cultural discourse in journalism, literature, and film to analyze changing notions of nationalism, authenticity, and postimperial identity.
