Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film

By Lee Clark Mitchell

Book Overview

A history of the Western in fiction and on film that shows how it reflects the changing obsessions and fears of American culture

Few genres are so closely identified with America as the Western. In this wide-ranging examination of the Western and its appeal, Lee Clark Mitchell ranges from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollar to show how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark book 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226532348
• ISBN13: 9780226532349
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 1.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Body Languages

Excellent book that relates a very specific and particualr genre like the western with a very wide source of refernces, from baby care to painting. It has a very good historical background that helps understand the obsession of gender and sex in the western genre.I particularly enjoyed the chapter where the author talks about Leone's living dead, it seems like if Jim Jarmusch had read it carefully for his "dead man".