Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film

By Lee Clark Mitchell

Book Overview

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.

"Elegantly written. . . . provocative . . . characterized by Mitchell's] own tendency to shoot from the hip."--J. Hoberman, London Review of Books

" Mitchell's] book would be worth reading just for the way he relates Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child to the postwar Western."--The Observer

"Integrating a careful handling of historical context with a keen eye for textual nuances, Mitchell reconstructs the Western's aesthetic tradition of the 19th century."--Aaron M. Wehner, San Francisco Review

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226532356
• ISBN13: 9780226532356
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.1"

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".