A Fistful of Icons: Essays on Frontier Fixtures of the American Western

by Sue Matheson (Editor)

Overview

After a century of reinvention and, frequently, reinterpretation, Western movies continue to contribute to the cultural understanding of the United States. And Western archetypes remain as important emblems of the American experience, relating a complex and coded narrative about heroism and morality, masculinity and femininity, westward expansion and technological progress, and assimilation and settlement.

In this collection of new essays, 21 contributors from around the globe examine the "cowboy cool" iconography of film and television Westerns--from bounty hunters in buckskin jackets to denizens of seedy saloons and lonely deserts, from Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford to Steve McQueen and Budd Boetticher, Jr.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786498048
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	07/13/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sue Matheson is a professor of English at the University College of the North in The Pas, Manitoba, Canada.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Performing the Iconic West: Wild West Shows (Cynthia J. Miller)
Buckskin Fringe and Cavalier Culture in the Hollywood Western (Sue Matheson)
The Urbanized West of Cecil B. DeMille (David Blanke)
“They taught us to be men”: Cigarettes, Westerns and (Mostly) John Ford (Richmond B. Adams)
The Good Bounty Hunter: Steve McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive (Kelly C. MacPhail)
Racialized Markers of Gender and Gendered Markers of Race in 1950s Westerns (Deborah L. ­Kitchen-Døderlein)
“Mister, this is cattle country”: Livestock and Gender in Western Films (Jim Daems)
Ride ’Em Cowboy: Equine Representations in the Western (Stella Hockenhull)
Horses for Ladies, ­High-Ridin’ Women and Whores (Maria Cecília de Miranda N. Coelho)
The Sexual Signification of the Gun in Western Film (Fran ­Pheasant-Kelly)
Rifles and Things in Winchester ’73 (Katherine A. Johnson)
The Cowboy Brew: Coffee and Conflict in the Westerns of Budd Boetticher, Jr. (Christopher Minz)
Cowboy Accommodations: Plotting the Hotel in Western Film and Television (Monica Montelongo Flores)
When Worlds Collide: Town and Country, ­Mise-en-Scène in Have Gun, Will Travel (Robert E. Meyer)
Executioner, Judge and Priest: The Desert Sublime in Westerns (Helen M. Lewis)
Machines in the Garden: Technology and the Western in the 1960s and 1970s (Martin Holtz)
“Dynamite blows two ways”: Dynamite in Western Films (Gilles Chamerois)
Trippy Pictures: Iconicizing the American Acid Westerns (Alexander Davis)
“Reach for the sky”: Western Iconography, the American Frontier and the Story of Pixar in Toy Story (Ashley Sufflé Robinson)
Burying the Past: Cemeteries, Burials and Remembrance in the Western (Andrew Howe)
The Four Archetypes of the Three Burials (of Melquiades Estrada) (Wickham Clayton)
About the Contributors
Index