Western American Literature最新文献

{"title":"Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community by Neil Campbell (review)","authors":"Christopher Conway","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912283","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community</em> by Neil Campbell <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christopher Conway </li> </ul> Neil Campbell, <em>Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community</em>. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2022. 227 pp. Paper, $45. <p>In a scholarly terrain defined by continuous reinvention, the critical practice of decentering remains as vibrant today as it did forty years ago, during the heyday of the so-called postmodern turn. Neil Campbell's ample body of scholarship on Westerns and the American West has been remarkably consistent in its commitment to bearing witness to histories of dispossession and oppression, and to recovering alternate ways of knowing. Using various devices, such as dialogism (Bakhtin), thirdspace (Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre), the rhizome (Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), and critical regionalism (Kenneth Frampton), Campbell has repeatedly shown how contemporary Westerns decenter oppressive and exclusionary discourses. In previous books like <em>The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age</em> and <em>Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West</em> he wove together sharp readings of films, novels, and nonfiction with an interdisciplinary synthesis of poststructuralist critical theory to show how texts can talk back to the myth of the American West. His latest book, <em>Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global</em>, adds another rewarding chapter to this decades-long critical project, as well as providing scholars with a valuable roadmap for interpreting twenty-first-century literary Westerns.</p> <p>Campbell anchors his new book in the concept of worlding, which unlike globalization is not associated with unidirectional and homogenizing processes. Worlding represents dynamic, unsettled, and resistant processes of signification that bind multiple spaces and identities together without reifying sameness or bounded categories. Campbell uses this frame to read fiction produced in the Trump era, which saw the prideful apotheosis of a monological nationalism nostalgic for the American 'frontier' and its exclusionary myths. Campbell presents the twenty-first-century novels and fictions that constitute the core of his book as literary challenges to this repressive ideology. These works are Hernán Díaz's <em>In the Distance</em>, Sebastian Barry's <em>Days Without End</em>, Téa Obreht's <em>Inland</em>, C Pam Zhang's <em>How Much of These Hills Is Gold</em>, Valeria Luiselli's <em>Lost</em> <strong>[End Page 289]</strong> <em>Children Archive</em>, and Tommy Orange's <em>There, There</em> and other \"tribalographies\" by Robin Wall Kimmerer and LeAnne Howe. Campbell's interpretations of these works, intertwined with his definition of","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138542305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Black Woman's West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon by Michael K. Johnson (review)","authors":"Jennifer S. Tuttle","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912280","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>A Black Woman's West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon</em> by Michael K. Johnson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jennifer S. Tuttle </li> </ul> Michael K. Johnson, <em>A Black Woman's West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon</em>. Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society Press, 2022. 265 pp. Paper, $24.95; e-book, $9.99. <p><em>A Black Woman's West</em> recounts the life of Rose Beatrice Gordon (1882–1968), a writer, businesswoman, physiotherapist, and talented performer whose nearly lifelong residence in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, illuminates the experiences of ordinary African American women in the rural western United States during her lifetime. Michael K. Johnson also folds in a rich recounting of her family history and of life in the community, illuminating African American history in Montana Territory and early statehood. Johnson enhances this superb biographical and historical work with two appendices, one reprinting several of Gordon's newspaper writings and another comprising an excellent bibliographic essay on African American Women in the American West. Gordon was best known as a prolific author of memorial tributes; <em>A Black Woman's West</em> is, in turn, Johnson's own tribute to Gordon herself.</p> <p>Beginning by reconstructing the histories of Gordon's parents, Anna and John, who settled in Montana Territory in 1881, Johnson narrates the growth of the family to include five children and charts their coming of age amid the \"surprisingly multicultural <strong>[End Page 282]</strong> environment\" of White Sulphur Springs, demonstrating how important the town's \"streets, businesses, buildings, and . . . people\" were to the developing identities of Rose and her siblings (15, 22). In the process, Johnson documents the expansion and contraction of the area's Black population, which by 1950 had shrunk to just Rose and her brother Robert. The Gordons' story reveals how life in White Sulphur Springs under the shadow of Jim Crow was both similar to and different from that in the country at large; Johnson lingers helpfully on the complex ways that minstrelsy was practiced in the town and on how the Gordons navigated racism's tensions in, and through, public performance. Johnson's recovery of not only Rose Gordon's but her mother's life is one of the most meaningful contributions of this volume, detailing Anna's unrelenting labor, at great personal cost, to \"ensur[e] her family's survival and well-being\" (45).</p> <p>Rose Gordon herself led an eventful life, her ambitions circumscribed by economic necessity, racial discrimination, and family obligation; for example, although she was class valedictorian, she postponed a hoped-for nursing career to help her mother run the family restaurant and store, taking up massage therapy late in life as she struggled to retain ownership of the family home. Yet as Jo","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote by Megan Riley McGilchrist (review)","authors":"Christie Smith","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912286","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote</em> by Megan Riley McGilchrist <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christie Smith </li> </ul> Megan Riley McGilchrist, <em>Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote</em>. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2021. 224 pp. Paper, $40. <p>This beautifully written autobiographical text interweaves the life and transformations of western American illustrator and writer Mary Hallock Foote with its author, one of the Western American Literature Association's stalwart members and presenters, Megan Riley McGilchrist. McGilchrist makes the considerable trek almost every year to the WLA conferences from London, England, where she teaches at The American School. McGrilchrist was a girl in the Bay Area and moved to England in her twenties. By contrast, Foote, 1847–1939, was raised in the settled eastern United States but lived in the West for the rest of her adult life. McGilchrist explores the effects of living away from one's birthplace using Foote's life and her own as exemplars. <em>Exile, Nature, and Transformation</em> uses Foote's letters as much as her fiction and art to illustrate her intimate views of life, the West, and society, since as McGilchrist, Melody Graulich, and others have noted, Foote's as yet unpublished letters are her best, most honest, and most intense writings. <strong>[End Page 294]</strong></p> <p>I imagine that this book will appeal to <em>WAL</em> readers, since many will have had similar professional trajectories: relocating after high school to college or graduate school and thence to somewhere(s) else for their teaching careers. <em>Exile, Nature, and Transformation</em> certainly speaks to me because like Foote I came from the East to the West in my twenties, stayed, and have taken decades to make sense of the differences I experience. Full disclosure: in my early thirties, I too was drawn to Foote's life and her stories of exile and reinvention. I wrote the second dissertation on her in the '90s and published a revised version of that in 2009. I too have read Foote's fiction and letters and visited Foote sites east and west and pondered on them.</p> <p>The focus of this book is none other than the midlife existential question of how we academics might more broadly share what we continue to study after we've written an academic book or two and published the necessary papers in our subject areas. Wanting to write a more accessible meditation on Foote than another learned tome read by only a few, McGilchrist explores how her Foote scholarship has informed and enriched her life and trajectories. She structures the book along the lines of Foote's fascinating biography, from the Quaker childhood along the Hudson River to the diverse sojourns—successful and unsuccessful—in 1870s California; 1870s travel tho","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West by Lawrence P. Jackson (review)","authors":"Jimmy L. Bryan Jr.","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912281","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West</em> by Lawrence P. Jackson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. </li> </ul> Lawrence P. Jackson, <em>Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West</em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2022. 312 pp. Hardcover, $44.95; e-book, $44.95. <p>At first glance the jacket designer Bea Jackson made a poor selection by using an out-of-focus image of uniformed Black soldiers posing for a photographer. The blurriness, of course, is intentional—by both jacket designer and movie director. The designer borrowed the image from Clint Eastwood's <em>The Outlaw Josey Wales</em> (1976), and it depicts the only appearance of Black characters—portrayed by uncredited actors—in the film and who merely provide backdrop scenery. For the author Lawrence P. Jackson, Eastwood's decision to dispose the Black presence in Civil War-era Westerns to the background reflected his desire to place them into \"a category of serene containment\" (108). Eastwood and his film <em>The Outlaw Josey Wales</em> provide the fulcrum around which Jackson examines how Western <strong>[End Page 284]</strong> films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries blurred the Black presence—elisions of slavery and segregation—in a larger project to reaffirm white paternalism and imperialism during the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war.</p> <p>Jackson argues that the earlier Westerns of John Ford and John Wayne such as <em>The Searchers</em> (1956), <em>The Alamo</em> (1960), and <em>Sergeant Rutledge</em> (1960) reflected the era's neoliberalism that condemned individual racism yet \"insisted on white stewardship\" and promoted US postwar imperialism (27). Later at the crest of the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam, Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns offered subversive anticolonial themes that functioned \"as a splinter to the hegemony of shared consensus\" (76). Eastwood attained iconic status portraying the Man with No Name, and he coopted the insurgency of Leone's films when he directed and starred in <em>The Outlaw Josey Wales</em>. Intended to assuage the white male anxieties of the 1970s, the film conflates the US defeat in Vietnam with the southern defeat during the Civil War. As Jackson explains, \"Eastwood is actually suturing the Lost Cause of the Southern Rebels to the crisis of those dismayed by American military defeat and loss of prestige in Vietnam\" (82). Eastwood's portrayal of the righteously violent white male and the apparent effectiveness of Black containment created a powerful cinematic touchstone that significantly informed the New Right. By adopting a kind of multiculturalism that obscured the injustices of economic and political inequality, the New Right ascended to power with t","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"59 3-4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties by Suzanne Roberts (review)","authors":"Jennifer Sinor","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912276","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912276","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties</em> by Suzanne Roberts <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jennifer Sinor </li> </ul> Suzanne Roberts, <em>Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties</em>. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 236 pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book, $19.95. <p>The opening essay to Suzanne Roberts's latest collection, <em>Animal Bodies</em>, prepares the reader for the journey ahead. She begins, \"The essay is transgressive.\" And while many modern essayists would immediately consider those acts of transgression as related to form alone—risking the notion of genre, refusing a narrative line—Roberts is pointing the reader toward something much more fundamental to the essay: its fierce dedication to the mind at work. And the mind, much like the body, is unruly. It does not abide. At its <strong>[End Page 273]</strong> best the essay, like the mind it follows, plunges into the dark spaces where the fearful refuse to go; once there, it asks questions that not only cannot be answered but are rarely even articulated. Roberts offers a series of transgressions in this collection, and those acts are most often related to her subject rather than to her form. Such a move is refreshing when so many writers seem to think that form itself is the only way to risk, the only way to complicate, the only way to invite the reader into the process. While not all of Roberts essays are linear, many of them are, and that makes the magic of her collection even more astounding because we find ourselves in the gaps of unknowing even though gaps might not exist on the page.</p> <p>The book is tripart in structure, and the first section tackles grief directly—the loss of a parent, the loss of a partner, the loss of the innocent to gun violence, the loss of millions to genocide. Because Roberts is a travel writer, these essays take place throughout the world, but they are united in their effort to grapple with all that does not remain. Roberts writes, \"I cannot access grief without metaphor, a way to measure the unmeasurable\" (14). And given the themes Roberts explores in this collection—death, desire, and our animal bodies that house both—it makes sense that Roberts turns to metaphor as a way to carry what cannot be held. Metaphor allows her to work small, to find meaning in the mundane and the ordinary, even when standing on the shores of Normandy or in an open-air market in Vietnam. For Roberts, grief seems to be stored in the things of the world—the birds, the bark of an aspen, the eye shadow worn by a dead friend, \"fished from the garbage\" and drawn across the lid. Each essay offers a new set of metaphors, a new way to capture what so often has passed.</p> <p>The second part of the book moves seamlessly from death to desire by placing the reader inside the animal body. She writes, \"I think ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"181 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The True Account of Myself as a Bird by Robert Wrigley (review)","authors":"Ronald McFarland","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912287","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The True Account of Myself as a Bird</em> by Robert Wrigley <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ronald McFarland </li> </ul> Robert Wrigley, <em>The True Account of Myself as a Bird</em>. New York: Penguin, 2022. 92 pp. Paper, $18. <p>Perhaps having read and reflected briefly on the twenty-two quatrains of \"Visitant,\" wherein the poet pisses in the snow, you found it fun but self-indulgent. But maybe, after another glass of wine or beer followed by another reading, you discovered more than you suspected. Spoiler alert: The \"visitant\" in the poem, \"whatever it is\"—possum?—does not emanate from the spirit world. Wrigley doesn't identify the creature beyond its \"ten-by-sixteen-inch rectangular\" size and its \"gleaming black eyes,\" but he plays the cordial host, and in the process, he reveals something of his character, both the man he is and the persona who inhabits most of his poems, who appear to be the same guy.</p> <p>But turn to the penultimate poem, \"She Said,\" of this, Wrigley's thirteenth collection, ninety-four lines in stanzas of variable lengths that reflect on the assassination of President Kennedy. Among hundreds of elegies and eulogies for JFK, \"She Said,\" encountered nearly sixty years after that tragedy, must strike readers as anything <em>but</em> a jeu d'esprit. Yet, \"She Said,\" which focuses on words uttered by Jackie Kennedy that fateful day—\"Oh Jack, what have they done?\"—arises from the same poetics we encounter in \"Visitant\": The apotheosis of the quotidian, a celebration of the ordinary.</p> <p>\"She Said\" opens with Wrigley's memory of diagramming sentences, \"one of the few things\" he was \"good at in school,\" and somehow that makes the poem more poignant than it would be had he launched directly into the shocking announcement over the school's intercom. The Secret Service agent, Wrigley notes, \"has remembered <strong>[End Page 296]</strong> what she said all his life since,\" and he writes that watching the funeral on TV he witnessed his father weep \"for the only time in my life.\" After that, he briefly describes the funeral, mentioning Jackie's lost \"pink pillbox hat\" and the \"strawberry pink, wool bouclé, double-breasted / Chanel suit\" she wore the day of the assassination, \"stiffened with her husband's blood.\"</p> <p>The poem then shifts to the twelve-year-old poet walking coatless in the cold November air, not wanting to watch his father cry, before returning to the scene of the shooting, the lost hat, the agent recalling Jackie's words remembered sixteen years later, followed unexpectedly by the mundane grammatical observation that those words constituted a \"rhetorical question,\" and at age twelve he had no idea what that meant. Then Wrigley diagrams the sentence, noting with a grammarian's aesthetic distance that the \"third person plural pronoun\" <em>they</em> \"refers to a gro","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands by Margaret D. Jacobs (review)","authors":"Meredith Eliassen","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912277","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands</em> by Margaret D. Jacobs <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Meredith Eliassen </li> </ul> Margaret D. Jacobs, <em>After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands</em>. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2021. 343 pp. Hardcover, $29.95; e-book, $29.95. <p>Cause and effect . . . action and reaction . . . I write this review with the bias of one born and raised on the lands of Ramaytush Ohlone and the Coastal Miwok, knowing these tribes as ethnobotanists and knowledgeable land stewards. Collective history and trauma over stolen lands is lost with American historic memory, the process society uses in selecting what history gets preserved for posterity. I read an account of a Native American woman, over one hundred years old, written during the late 1850s. She lived near Mount Saint Helens, Washington, before the American Revolution. Published in <em>The Hesperian</em> (July 1859), the first successful women's literary magazine published by women west of the Rockies, the unnamed Indigenous woman was described in the most derogatory and dehumanizing terms. The major takeaway from the article, published before the Civil War about a Native American born before the Revolutionary War, was the gentle care that one tribe offered a displaced female elder, and that care was trivialized.</p> <p>Margaret D. Jacobs, a historian of settlement in the American West, speaks of comparative colonization patterns in Canada and Australia (showing the United States was not alone in historic atrocities) in <em>After One Hundred Years</em>. She probes unyielding processes of surfacing traumatic events to reconcile them to release rancidness from collective past acts. Jacobs considers \"what could be possible in the United States if we engaged in collective soul-searching and dared to remember and acknowledge\" (16). Truth is necessary to dial back inaccurate elements of historic memory for reconciliation to take place. Jacobs positions herself as a white settler addressing white settlers: \"It can no longer be acceptable to reap the advantages of settler colonialism without facing up to the damage it inflicted, and still inflicts on indigenous people\" (10).</p> <p>The structure of this book is reassuring and aspirational; it needs to be to ease readers into difficult long-term processes of reconciling polarized narratives, painful history, and the dominant settler narrative in American history and popular literature. \"Part <strong>[End Page 276]</strong> One: Our Founding Crimes\" describes historic atrocities, including an account from the son of mountain man William Bent and Owl Woman of the horrific 1864 Sand Creek Massacre \"of children, their mothers, and their grandparents\" (31–32).</p> <p>In \"Part 2: Promoting Reconciliat","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West by E Cram (review)","authors":"Christine Self","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912279","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West</em> by E Cram <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christine Self </li> </ul> E Cram, <em>Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West</em>. Oakland: U of California P, 2022. 292 pp. Hardcover, $85; paperback and e-book, $34.95. <p>The opening to E Cram's <em>Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West</em> asks its central question: \"What does it mean to route 'sexuality' through modernity's relationship to energy?\" (1). In exploring this question, Cram argues that queer studies must include energy in theorizing on sexual modernity, due to energy's centrality in the relationship between humans and land/environment, manifested in how extraction of energy from the land enervates, or exhausts, marginalized peoples while offering innervation, or revitalization, to the dominant. <em>Violent Inheritance</em> builds on previous scholarship surrounding vitality and its use in discourses on racial and sexual degeneracy. Using the concept of \"land lines,\" or connections between energy regimes, sexuality, and the land and contested memories of the North American West as a key term for the book, Cram adds new dimensions to queer studies, queer ecological criticism, and the energy and environmental humanities.</p> <p>The book includes an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. After laying a solid foundation for understanding the key terms and concepts of the study in the introduction, Cram shares, in the body of the book, the results of archival inquiry, participant observation, and personal interviews taking place in key areas of the North American West. Chapter one opens with writer Owen Wister's account of attending the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and <strong>[End Page 280]</strong> his drawing masculine energy from the manufactured Western exhibit called \"Wooded Island\" with its rustic and manly \"Hunter's Cabin.\" Cram presents Wister's accounts as those of settler movement from the urban East to the untamed West in search of land from which to extract vitality.</p> <p>Also set in the past, chapter two investigates settler feminist Grace Raymond Hebard's map- and myth-making in Wyoming by examining the archival collection of her papers, artifacts, and ephemera collected at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Cram posits the foci of Hebard's writing, Sacajawea as an \"Indian Princess\" and eugenics, represent the production of a national vitality, where heredity and racial homogenization energize whiteness while consuming Indigeneity.</p> <p>Cram uses present-day personal observations of visiting significant sites in chapters three and four. These sites include the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg and its contest","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"19 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Turn in the Fog: Gertrude Atherton Reads Henry James","authors":"Lisa Orr","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912273","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> A Turn in the Fog<span>Gertrude Atherton Reads Henry James</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lisa Orr (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In 1904 Gertrude Atherton, best-selling author and self-proclaimed admirer of Henry James's work, sought the Master's blessing for her own: she wrote asking if she could dedicate her forthcoming volume of short stories to him. He responded kindly, concluding, \"May my name, I mean, contribute to bring your work better fortune than it usually contributes to bring mine\" (Atherton, <em>Adventures</em> 375). In her autobiography Atherton followed this account with a surprising conclusion: \"In the course of the year I wrote a long short story of which Henry James was the hero and called it \"The Bell in the Fog\"; and this title I gave to the volume of short stories I had asked permission to dedicate to him\" (<em>Adventures</em> 375).</p> <p>This might be legerdemain, but Atherton sounds as if she obtained his blessing before she wrote the story. Securing a preemptive promise would make sense, since \"The Bell in the Fog\" contains a barely veiled, unflattering portrait of James: Ralph Orth, a celebrated writer who buys an English estate resembling <em>The Turn of the Screw</em>'s Bly Manor. As in <em>The Turn of the Screw</em>, the main character experiences what may, or may not, be supernatural events; children also figure largely. In fact, Atherton's plot contains enough allusions to James's to qualify as a parody. More importantly, she provides not merely a comment on James's style and subject but a forceful repudiation of James's critique of both the New Woman and the New World.</p> <p>Atherton was not well acquainted with James: by her own account, she met him three times. Nor was she afforded his stature, though considered important in her lifetime. Often she <strong>[End Page 221]</strong> is lumped with other women writers of the time as a regionalist since she wrote of her home state of California—although she also produced historical fiction, social realism, and even international novels. According to her biographer Emily Wortis Leider, Atherton \"was praised by George Meredith and Oscar Wilde, championed by Ambrose Bierce, sought out by Rebecca West, befriended by Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, and often mentioned in the same sentence as Edith Wharton\" (1). But Leider argues that she wrote rapidly; her output was uneven (1). Clever and unkind, she burned bridges with writers, publishers, and critics. Today she is seldom remembered.</p> <p>In an interview with <em>The New York Times</em> after her story collection appeared in 1905, Atherton explained why her responses to James were not truly contradictory: \"Why the dedication to Henry James? Because I admire his work. . . . One may detest a workman but adore his work\" (Pendennis). The same mixture of respect and resentment had been present at th","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"70 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The American Western in Canadian Literature by Joel Deshaye (review)","authors":"John Donahue","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912275","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The American Western in Canadian Literature</em> by Joel Deshaye <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> John Donahue </li> </ul> Joel Deshaye, <em>The American Western in Canadian Literature</em>. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2022. 414 pp. Hardcover, $64.99; paper, $34.99; e-book, $19.24. <p>It has been argued that the Western is the only truly American genre, rooted in American history and embodying key values of American society, those of independence and self-reliance, courage and persistence in the face of challenges. Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis concerning the formative role of the frontier in shaping American character is at the heart of the Western and is the essence of popular Western novels such as those of Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, Elmer Kelton, Max Brand, Larry McMurtry, William Johnstone, and Philipp Meyer. The novelist James Fenimore Cooper expounded on the Frontier Thesis decades before the concept would occur to Turner. Alistair Hennessy studies the centrality of the Frontier Thesis in his book <em>The Frontier in Latin American History</em> (1978). While the geographical context of European settlement of Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico produced a variety of \"cowboy\" figures, the lack of an organizing concept parallel to the Frontier Thesis explains why these cousins of the American type never became symbols of their respective nation's personality nor the subject of a literary or cinematic tradition; rather, translations of American Westerns have been the order of the day in all these countries. Canada, even more so than the Central and South American nations, lacks a corresponding frontier mythos. Often described as the bureaucrat's paradise, Canada opened its West with the process firmly controlled by government authorities. This lack of drive on the part of individuals is reflected in the fact that the French Colonies in 1759 still relied on France for essential foodstuffs such as flour. New France could not have survived without subsidies from the motherland, despite a century and a half of settlement. In a similar way, the Canadian West relied heavily on Ontario for its development. The Canadian personality is <strong>[End Page 271]</strong> essentially antithetical to the personality type favored by American Westerns.</p> <p>Professor Deshaye's study of the American Western in Canadian literature is a thoroughly researched effort to explore the topic. The extensive bibliography as well as the many footnotes show the scope of that research and is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the topic. The table of contents likewise presents the scope of the discussion covering traditional perspectives and contemporary topics (colonialism, Indigenous issues) related to both novels and film. The Western as a literary form, however, has very s","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138542333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}