Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women's Writing

by Krista Comer

Overview

In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women's movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers.
Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and antimodern, have been slow to reckon with the emergence of a new, far more "feminine," postmodern, multiracial, and urban west. Here, she calls for a redesign of the field of western cultural studies, one that engages issues of gender and race and is more self-conscious about space itself—especially that cherished symbol of western "authenticity," open landscape. Surveying works by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Clearman Blew, Comer shows how these and other contemporary women writers have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807848135
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	06/28/1999
Series:	Cultural Studies of the United States
Edition description:	1
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Krista Comer teaches English and women's studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Postmodernism, Literary Nationalism, and Western Cultural Production
Part I. Toward a Spatial History of the New Feminist Regionalism
1. Landscapes of Westernness: Gender, Race, and the Politics of American Spaces
2. Urbanscapes in the Golden Land: California as Western Continuum

Part II. Gender and the "Master" Landscapes of Western Narrative
3. Sidestepping Environmental Justice: "Natural" Landscapes and the Wilderness Plot
4. Queering Heterosexual Love: Trailer Parks, Telenovelas, and Other Landscapes of Feminist Desire
5. A Good Country Is Hard to Find: Journeys toward Postnational Landscapes
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Truly indispensable to scholars working with the literature of the American West, American studies, environmental theory, and feminist criticism.—Western American Literature



Comer has established the richness of an evolving Western literature that quarrels with and extends not only the legends bracketing the Marlboro Man and Clint Eastwood but also the regionalism of the earlier women writers.—Women's Review of Books



Extensively explores the element of landscape—the single most unifying factor in all writing of the West—and specifically how landscape is presented by the female literary tradition.—Library Journal



Landscapes of the New West marks a major advance in connecting feminist thinking with Western regional thinking. Exploring the works of writers from Joan Didion to Sandra Cisneros, from Wanda Coleman to Mary Clearman Blew, Krista Comer thinks and analyzes with an extraordinary intensity and vigor. Under her attention, familiar assumptions about the West and its meanings are reconfigured into the sparkling elements of a new intellectual kaleidoscope. Especially in its reckoning with race and with dreams of the wilderness, this book makes you think, and think with freshness.—Patricia Nelson Limerick, University of Colorado at Boulder



This landmark book is a deft and gracefully written survey of the 'new female regionalism' in U.S. literary and cultural studies. Comer splendidly integrates urban geography, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and literary detail in a cross-cultural framework that neither fragments nor totalizes.—Jose David Saldivar, University of California, Berkeley (or, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies)



In a breathtakingly provocative and original study that forever de-mythologizes the masculinist west of Owen Wister and Wallace Stegner, Krista Comer makes a persuasive case that there is a new literary female regionalism and that the heart of this new regionalist sensibility is decidedly feminist and postmodern. By surveying writers like Joan Didion, Leslie Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Sandra Cisneros, Louis Erdrich, Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Freeman and others, Comer uncovers how these new female regionalists imaginatively relate to, construct, and narratively inhabit their many different western landscapes.—Annette Kolodny, University of Arizona



Krista Comer's Landscapes of the New West offers inventive new readings of contemporary western women writers like Didion, Silko, Kingsolver, Anzaldua, and Kingston, readings grounded in interdisciplinary work on feminist geography, new western history, ecocriticism, environmental history, postcolonial studies, and postmodernism. Always politically engaged and risk-taking, Comer creates a new multi-ethnic literary landscape in the American West.—Melody Graulich, editor, Western American Literature

Annette Kolodny

Breathtakingly provocative and original...Comer males a persuasive case that there is new literary female regionalism and that [its] heart...is decidedly feminist and postmodern.
— Author of The Lay of the Land

Editorial Reviews

Comer has established the richness of an evolving Western literature.

"Women s Review of Books"

Comer splendidly integrates urban geography, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and literary detail.

Jose David Saldivar, University of California, Berkeley

Especially in its reckoning with race and with dreams of the wilderness, this book makes you think, and think with freshness.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, University of Colorado at Boulder

Truly indispensable to scholars working with the literature of the American West, American studies, environmental theory, and feminist criticism.

"Western American Literature"

"Comer splendidly integrates urban geography, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and literary detail.

Jose David Saldivar, University of California, Berkeley"

"Especially in its reckoning with race and with dreams of the wilderness, this book makes you think, and think with freshness.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, University of Colorado at Boulder"

"Truly indispensable to scholars working with the literature of the American West, American studies, environmental theory, and feminist criticism.

"Western American Literature""

Extensively explores the element of landscape--the single most unifying factor in all writing of the West.

"Library Journal"

From the Publisher