The books in this section focus on the issues of race and gender representations in films of the Western genre.
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Women of the Frontier
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Sense of History
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Hell on Horses
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Making the Man
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Hollywood Indian
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Ron Lackman. Women of the Western Frontier in Fact, Fiction and Film. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1997.
From Amazon: This work provides factual accounts of women of the Old West in contrast to their depictions on film and in fiction. The lives of Martha “Calamity Jane” Canary and Belle “The Bandit Queen” Starr are first detailed; one discovers that Starr was indeed friends with notorious bank robbers of the time, including Jesse James and Cole Younger, but was herself primarily a cattle and horse thief. Wives and lovers of some of the West’s most famous outlaws are covered in the second section along with real-life female entertainers, prostitutes and gamblers. Native Americans, entrepreneurs, doctors, reformers, artists, writers, schoolteachers, and other such “respectable” women are covered in the third section. |
Richard Maltby. "A Better Sense of History: John Ford and the Indians." In Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye, eds. The Book of Westerns. New York: Continuum, 1996.
From Amazon: The Book of Westerns concentrates on the period between 1939 and the present day, looking at the Western from a wide variety of perspectives and providing in-depth critical analysis of many notable movies up to Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994). The coverage includes such celebrated works as George Stevens's Shane with Alan Ladd as the archetypal solitary Western hero, Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar where the combatants in the final gunfight are Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, and King Vidor's Duel in the Sun with its orgasmic climax when Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones shoot each other down and then claw their way toward a dying embrace. The text, mainly written by film critics and academics associated with Movie magazine, is aimed at the informed filmgoer as well as the film student and is illustrated throughout with stills that capture the flavor of the Western. |
Alice Marriott. Hell on Horses & Women. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953.
From Amazon: The world of the West has been from the beginning a man's world, but there are homes and wives and children there, too. And although the time of water hauled in barrels and of homemade candles is long past, the ranch wife of today must be prepared to deal with housekeeping, shopping, and personal problems in wholly original ways as the need arises. For ranches are usually far from town and neighbors are scattered, so that good humor and a good sense of humor, as well as the more conventional virtues of courage and fortitude, must be possessed by the ranch woman. For more than eighteen months Alice Marriott traveled the cattle country from Wyoming to Florida–visiting, observing, and talking with the women on the ranches and with their men. This book is the story of these women, who share with their men-folks the problems and pleasures of ranch life. It's about the city girl transformed into ranch wife, about the women who were born on ranches, and about their families and the cattle they raise. She reports on the modern roundups, the cattle sales, the courage of both men and women in the face of a howling blizzard, and the tragedy of a cow with a broken leg. Here they are-the real people of the cattle country and the real things that happen to them in a society in which the man's work is sharply distinguished from the woman's. And, concludes Miss Marriott, ranch life "can be hard and tough and truly hell for the women who live it, but it can also come about as close to Heaven as any life a woman can live today." This is a book for Western enthusiasts, for women everywhere, and for just good reading. |
Lee Clark Mitchell. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
From Google Books: 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. This landmark study shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man. |
John E. O'Connor. The Hollywood Indian: Stereotypes of Native Americans in Films. Trenton: New Jersey State Museum, 1980.
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Collapse of Fantasy
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Masculinities in Literature
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Some Kind of Man
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Douglas Pye. “The Collapse of Fantasy: Masculinity in the Westerns of Anthony Mann.” In Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye, eds. The Book of Westerns. New York: Continuum, 1996.
From Amazon: The Book of Westerns concentrates on the period between 1939 and the present day, looking at the Western from a wide variety of perspectives and providing in-depth critical analysis of many notable movies up to Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp(1994). The coverage includes such celebrated works as George Stevens's Shane with Alan Ladd as the archetypal solitary Western hero, Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar where the combatants in the final gunfight are Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, and King Vidor's Duel in the Sun with its orgasmic climax when Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones shoot each other down and then claw their way toward a dying embrace. The text, mainly written by film critics and academics associated with Movie magazine, is aimed at the informed filmgoer as well as the film student and is illustrated throughout with stills that capture the flavor of the Western. |
Lydia R. Cooper. Masculinities in Literature of the American West. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
From Palgrave Macmillan: The Western genre provides the most widely recognized, iconic images of masculinity in the United States - gun-slinging, laconic white male heroes who emphasize individualism, violence, and an idiosyncratic form of justice. This idealized masculinity has been fused with ideas of national identity and character. Masculinities in Literature of the American West examines how contemporary literary Westerns push back against the coded image of the Western hero, exposing pervasive anxieties about what it means to "act like a man." Contemporary Westerns critique assumptions about innate connections between power, masculinity, and "American" character that influence public rhetoric even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These novels struggle with the monumental challenge of all Westerns: the challenge of being human in a place where "being a man" is so strictly coded, so unachievable, so complicit in atrocity, and so desirable that it is worth dying for, worth killing for, or perhaps worth nothing at all. |
Roderick McGillis. He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009.
From Amazon: He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western explores the construction and representation of masculinity in low-budget western movies made from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These films contained some of the mid-twentieth-century’s most familiar names, especially for youngsters: cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Red Ryder. The first serious study of a body of films that was central to the youth of two generations, He Was Some Kind of a Man combines the author’s childhood fascination with this genre with an interdisciplinary scholarly exploration of the films' influence on modern views of masculinity. McGillis argues that the masculinity offered by these films is less one-dimensional than it is plural, perhaps contrary to expectations. Their deeply conservative values are edged with transgressive desire, and they construct a male figure who does not fit into binary categories, such as insider/outsider or masculine/feminine. Particularly relevant is the author’s discussion of George W. Bush as a cowboy and how his aspirations to cowboy ideals continue to shape American policy. This engagingly written book will appeal to the general reader interested in film, westerns, and contemporary culture as well as to scholars in film studies, gender studies, children’s literature, and autobiography. |