The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western

By Michael Coyne

Book Overview

This text employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions - political, racial, sexual, social and religious - which have beset modern America from "Stagecoach" and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. The book focuses on a group of great Westerns, showing how they engaged covertly with such issues as miscegenation, labour-management relations, generational discord, codes of masculinity, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, increasing individual social alienation, and explains why a celebratory genre veered, during a generation of unprecedented power and prosperity, from sagas of national achievement to bleak, virtually asocial visions of life in the United States.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1860642594
• ISBN13: 9781860642593
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: I. B. Tauris & Company
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.2"