Westerns
Subtitle: Making the Man in Fiction and Film
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: November 15, 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 348
ISBN-13: 9780226532349
Subjects: Cultural studies; Film theory & criticism; Novels, other prose & writers; Westerns; American Western Fiction; Special Subjects In Literature; Literary Criticism; Pop Arts / Pop Culture; American English; USA; Film & Video - History & Criticism; Performing Arts / Film / History & Criticism; Semiotics & Theory; 20th century; American fiction; History; History and criticism; Masculinity; United States; Western stories
First sentence: A curious sense of disproportion is evoked by any listing of luminaries who loved Westerns, as if that were the sole common denominator among such different lives: Richard Nixon, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Stalin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean Cocteau, Sherwood Anderson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Simone de Beauvoir, Douglas MacArthur, Akira Kurosawa.
Description: Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, Mitchell shows how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture, including debates and nationalism, suffragetism, the White Slave Trade, liberal social policy, even Dr. Spock.

At the same time, Westerns have addressed issues of masculinity by setting them against various backdrops: gender (women), maturation (sons), honor (violence, restraint), and self-transformation (the West itself). Mitchell argues, for instance, that Westerns repeatedly depict men being punished as pretext for allowing them to recover, restoring themselves once again to full manhood. In Westerns, a man must continually work at being a man.

. The most extensive study of Westerns to appear in twenty-five years, Mitchell's book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the genre as well as for students of film, masculinity, and American Studies.