Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors viii
Part I: Introduction 1
1 Imagining the West 3 Nicolas S. Witschi
Part II: Regions and Histories 11
2 Exploration, Trading, Trapping, Travel, and Early Fiction, 1780–1850 13 Edward Watts
3 Worlds of Wonder and Ambition: Gold Rush California and the Culture of Mining Bonanzas in the North American West 29 Peter J. Blodgett
4 The Literate West of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals 48 Tara Penry
5 A History of American Women’s Western Books, 1833–1928 63 Nina Baym
6 Literary Cultures of the American Southwest 81 Daniel Worden
7 Literary Cartography of the Great Plains 98 Susan Naramore Maher
8 The Literary Northern Rockies as The Last Best Place 115 O. Alan Weltzien
9 North by Northwest: The Last Frontier of Western Literature 130 Eric Heyne
10 Chronotopes of the Asian American West 145 Hsuan L. Hsu
11 African American Literature and Culture and the American West 161 Michael K. Johnson
12 Mythical Frontiers: Manifest Destiny, Aztlán, and the Cosmic Race 177 John L. Escobedo
13 Writing the Indigenous West 191 Kathleen Washburn
14 Framing Class in the Rural West: Cowboys, Double-wides, and McMansions 213 Nancy Cook
15 Postcolonial West 229 Alex Hunt
16 New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest 244 Krista Comer
Part III: Varieties and Forms 261
17 What We Talk About When We Talk About Western Art 263 Brian W. Dippie
18 “All Hat and No Cattle”: Romance, Realism, and Late Nineteenth-Century Western American Fiction 281 Gary Scharnhorst
19 The Coyote Nature of Cowboy Poetry 297 Barbara Barney Nelson
20 “The Wind Blew Them Away”: Folksinging the West, 1880–1930 316 David Fenimore
21 Autobiography 336 Gioia Woods
22 Housing the American West: Western Women’s Literature, Early Twentieth Century and Beyond 353 Cathryn Halverson
23 The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree: Western American Literature and Environmental Literary Criticism 367 Hal Crimmel
24 Detective Fiction 380 Nicolas S. Witschi
25 The American Western Film 395 Corey K. Creekmur
26 Post-Western Cinema 409 Neil Campbell
Part IV: Issues, Themes, Case Studies 425
27 America Unscripted: Performing the Wild West 427 Jefferson D. Slagle
28 Revising Public Memory in the American West: Native American Performance in the Ramona Outdoor Play 443 Karen E. Ramirez
29 Omnimedia Marketing: The Case of The Lone Ranger 462 Chadwick Allen
30 The Nuclear Southwest 483 Audrey Goodman
31 Ranging over Stegner’s Arid West: Mobility as Adaptive Strategy 499 Bonney MacDonald
32 The Global West: Temporality, Spatial Politics, and Literary Production 514 Susan Kollin
33 Tumbling Dice: The Problem of Las Vegas 528 Stephen Tatum and Nathaniel Lewis
Index 547
