The American Western in Canadian literature / Joel Deshaye.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Deshaye, Joel, author.

Series:

West series (Calgary, Alta.)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Canadian fiction.

Canadian literature.

Western stories, Canadian.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (426 pages)

Place of Publication:

Calgary University of Calgary Press 2022

Calgary, Alberta : University of Calgary Press, [2022]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary phenomenon. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Scaling and Spacing the Genre

Tom King’s John Wayne

The Northwestern Cross

From Law to Outlaw

CanLit’s Postmodern Westerns

Degeneration through Violence

Mining the Western in the Twenty-First Century

Works Reproduced in Part

Works Consulted

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-77385-268-X

1-77385-269-8

OCLC:

1290896231