Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West

by R. Dyck, C. Reutter

Overview

In one consequential volume, Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West presents the cross-section of a fast-changing and greatly expanded field. Through interdisciplinary essays, this volume on the post-national West challenges the idea of a unified national story sustained by strategic exclusions. Contributors analyze the economic and environmental exploitation depicted in working-class Western literature, emphasize the transnational by approaching both the North/South and cross-Atlantic axes grapple with the role of Mormons, and dissect the new masculinity of "Silicon Gunslingers." Each essay successfully and compellingly models a new and fruitful way of engaging the West.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230613430
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	03/24/2009
Edition description:	2009
Pages:	243
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

REGINLAD DYCK is English Professor at Capital University, USA. CHELI REUTTER is Assistant Professor of Literature and Languages at Northern Kentucky University, USA.

Table of Contents

Electronic Pioneers and Silicon Gunslingers: Constructing Histories of the U.S. Computer Industry; J.Sartain From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley; R.Crooks American Outsiders at the Center: Mormons and the West; R.Heinze Middlebrow Readers and Pioneer Heroines: Willa Cather's My Antonia ; B.Streeter Aldrich's A Lantern in Her Hand and the Popular Fiction Market; M.Homestead

Editorial Reviews

"The variety of provocative approaches, new critical inquiries, and challenges to comfortable but worn ways of thinking embodied in this collection returns to us a variety of American Wests that have much to tell us about our multiple pasts and our various futures." - Great Plains Quarterly

"These essays expand one s understanding of western terrain through multiple axes: geographical, political, historical, and cultural. The contributing scholars challenge the received knowledge of the West, offering valuable revisions to concepts like transnationalism, the working class, popular culture, and the canon. This collection does not simply crisscross borders: it engages them, wrestles with them, redefines them, even defies them. Dyck and Reutter offer up a new literary atlas of the West and in doing so redraw the map of western American studies." - Susan Naramore Maher, Peter Kiewit Distinguished Professor of English, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Past President, Western Literature Association

"Wide-ranging in many ways, this exciting volume itself crosses borders to gather scholars from various disciplines and locations to explore the works of a selection of important, diverse writers . . .A most valuable volume!" - Emory Elliott, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Riverside

"This valuable collection occupies an important area of regionalist studies, with strong essays on ethnicity and class. The worldliness of the volume's contributors and the range of voices are noteworthy." - Guy Reynolds, Professor of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and General Editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition

From the Publisher