Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space

by Susan Kollin

Overview

Postwestern Cultures synthesizes the most critical topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West within a single volume. This interdisciplinary anthology features leading scholars in the varied fields of western American literary studies and includes new regional studies, global studies, studies of popular culture, environmental criticism, gender and queer theory, and multiculturalism. Postwestern Cultures, like all successful studies of western American literature, is necessarily diverse and wide-ranging; it grasps the multifaceted quality of the landscape, literature, and critical analysis by engaging postmodern theory, spatial theory, cultural studies, and transnational and transcultural understandings of the local.

This collection emphasizes the importance of understanding the region not as a confined or static space but as a constantly changing entity in both substance and form. It 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 abandoned western landscapes.

Susan Kollin is an associate professor of English at Montana State University and the author of Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier.

Contributors: Michael Beehler, Neil Campbell, Krista Comer, Nancy Cook, Audrey Goodman, Melody Graulich, Susan Kollin, Beth Loffreda, Lee Clark Mitchell, Capper Nichols, David Oates, John Streamas, and Stephen Tatum.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803260443
Publisher:	Nebraska Paperback
Publication date:	11/01/2007
Series:	Postwestern Horizons
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Susan Kollin is an associate professor of English at Montana State University and the author of Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier.
 
Contributors: Michael Beehler, Neil Campbell, Krista Comer, Nancy Cook, Audrey Goodman, Melody Graulich, Susan Kollin, Beth Loffreda, Lee Clark Mitchell, Capper Nichols, David Oates, John Streamas, and Stephen Tatum.

Table of Contents

Contents

 

Acknowledgments  

Introduction: Postwestern Studies, Dead or Alive     

      Susan Kollin

 

Part 1: Newer New Wests

1. Spectrality and the Postregional Interface

      Stephen Tatum

2. Everyday Regionalisms in Contemporary Critical Practice 

      Krista Comer

3. Critical Regionalism, Thirdspace, and John Brinckerhoff Jackson's Western Cultural Landscapes

      Neil Campbell

4. Architecture and the Virtual West in William Gibson's San Francisco 

      Michael Beehler

 

Part 2: Nature and Culture  

5. What's Authentic about Western Literature? And, More to the Point, What's Literary? 

      Lee Clark Mitchell

6. Some Questions about Sexless Nature Writing

      David Oates

7. Backpacking and the Ultralight Solution 

      Capper Nichols

8. Survival, Alaska Style 

      Susan Kollin

 

Part 3: Contested Wests

9. Scheduling Idealism in Laramie, Wyoming 

      Beth Loffreda

10. Frontier Mythology, Children's Literature, and Japanese American Incarceration 

      John Streamas

11. I'm Just a Lonesome Korean Cowgirl; or, Adoption and National Identity   

      Melody Graulich

12. Cultivating Otowi Bridge 

      Audrey Goodman

13. The Romance of Ranching; or, Selling Place-Based Fantasies in and of the West  

      Nancy Cook

 

References 

Contributors    

Editorial Reviews

"This wide-ranging collection of essays is an ambitious demonstration of the New Western Criticism at work."—Geneva M. Gano, Journal of the West

Journal of the West - Geneva M. Gano

“Like a showdown in an old western, a meeting between post-prefixed studies and the West was just plain inevitable. Postwestern Cultures stages a version of the event, and anyone interested in the American West ought to study the result.”—Daryl W. Palmer, Western Historical Quarterly
 

Western Historical Quarterly - Daryl W. Palmer

"With its multiplicity of approaches Postwestern Cultures works to liberate "the West" from its moorings in place, time, and myth. Its interesting and insightful essays provide ways to construct the region not as a static but as a fluid entity that, like Whitman's iconic American self, "contains multitudes"."—Donna Campbell, Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly - Donna Campbell

"This outstanding collection provides not only an overview of the best current scholarship on the West, but also a glimpse of the future of Western Studies."—Darryl Hattenhauer, American Studies

American Studies - Darryl Hattenhauer

"This wide-ranging collection of essays is an ambitious demonstration of the New Western Criticism at work."—Geneva M. Gano, Journal of the West

— Geneva M. Gano

Journal of the West

"This outstanding collection provides not only an overview of the best current scholarship on the West, but also a glimpse of the future of Western Studies."—Darryl Hattenhauer, American Studies

— Darryl Hattenhauer

American Studies

"With its multiplicity of approaches Postwestern Cultures works to liberate "the West" from its moorings in place, time, and myth. Its interesting and insightful essays provide ways to construct the region not as a static but as a fluid entity that, like Whitman's iconic American self, "contains multitudes."—Donna Campbell, Great Plains Quarterly

— Donna Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

“Like a showdown in an old western, a meeting between post-prefixed studies and the West was just plain inevitable. Postwestern Cultures stages a version of the event, and anyone interested in the American West ought to study the result.”—Daryl W. Palmer, Western Historical Quarterly

— Daryl W. Palmer

Western Historical Quarterly