The word rides again
Subtitle: rereading the frontier in American fiction
By: J. David Stevens.
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Athens, Ohio
Language: eng
Number of pages: 236
Subjects: American fiction -- History and criticism.; Western stories -- History and criticism.; Frontier and pioneer life in literature.
Description: "With much recent scholarship polarizing frontier novels into "popular" and "literary" camps, The Word Rides Again challenges the critical orthodoxy that such works have little in common, arguing instead that formulaic Western fictions can subtly (and even subversively) share cultural concerns with more highbrow brethren. Each chapter focuses on a writer who has traditionally been classified as either popular or artistic, reading a representative fictional work against prevailing scholarly trends.

In this manner, Bret Harte's sentimental stories become gender-bending experiments in which women assume male roles and even enjoy lesbian relationships. Owen Wister's The Virginian is transmuted from a misogynistic diatribe into a complex meditation on the peculiarly American relation of violence to male identity. And even Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, rather than the apotheosis of a religious leader, becomes a somewhat standard version of the popular frontier story.".

"The Word Rides Again represents a significant departure from more traditional studies of frontier literature. It reaffirms the continuum between popular and literary texts and explores the ways that frontier novels have echoed, endorsed, and extended each other from the inception of the genre."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 221-231) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: 1 Hobomok: A Brief Case Study from the Beginning; title: of the Genre; title: 2 "She war a woman": Family Roles, Gender, and Sexuality; title: in Bret Harte's Western Fiction; title: 3 "Don't forget the cowboys, Sandy": Mark Twain; title: and the Western Myth; title: 4 A Man's Role: Literary Influence and The Virginian; title: 5 (Re)Writing a Native American Western: John Rollin Ridge; title: and Zitkala-Sa; title: 6 Riders of the Papal Sage: Willa Cather's "Western"; title: 7 The Many Echoes of The Man Who Killed the Deer.