Western American Literature最新文献

{"title":"The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts by Robinson Jeffers (review)","authors":"Cory Willard","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912285","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 Point Alma Venus Manuscripts</em> by Robinson Jeffers <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Cory Willard </li> </ul> Robinson Jeffers, <em>The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts</em>, edited by Tim Hunt and Robert Kafka. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2022. 320 pp. Hardcover, $75. <p>For an American poet who read at the Library of Congress and appeared on the cover of <em>Time Magazine</em> in 1932, it is a minor marvel that Robinson Jeffers is now largely uncelebrated outside of the exceptions of groups like the Western Literature Association and specific scholars of Californian poets. <em>The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts</em>, published by Stanford University Press, began life in 1970 when editor Robert Kafka discovered a 1926 letter from Jeffers to his editor, Donald Friede (vii). Several decades in the making, this edition, transcribed from Jeffers's own handwriting and a dedicated example of literary archaeology, collects Jeffers's four attempts at exploring the Rev. Dr. Barclay story that would eventually become the basis of <em>The Women at Point Sur</em> (1927). The manuscripts include several features for those interested in the innerworkings of Jeffers's mind and his writing process, including notations regarding unclear words, marginalia from Jeffers, and words crossed out by Jeffers as he composed (produced in strikethrough text).</p> <p>Each of the four attempts shows the stops and starts of a poet <strong>[End Page 292]</strong> attempting to explore the depths of big questions regarding power, human consciousness, and the nature of God. The first attempt, titled \"Storm as Deliverer (initial version),\" consists of forty-four pages; \"The Ur-Point Alma Venus,\" the second attempt, eighty pages; \"Storm as Deliverer (MacTorald version),\" thirty-five pages; and the final \"Point Alma Venus,\" eighty-nine pages. The first two versions were likely written in the yearlong gap between Jeffers's celebrated longform poems <em>Tamar</em> and <em>The Tower Beyond Tragedy</em> (284). The third attempt was likely written between <em>The Tower Beyond Tragedy</em> and <em>Roan Stallion</em>, with the final \"Point Alma Venus\" attempt being written after <em>Roan Stallion</em> (1926) but before <em>The Women at Point Sur</em> (284). Throughout the versions, the Barclay character who \"outgrew his God,\" is represented at various ages (from fifty to sixty-seven, depending on the version), with each exploring his Zarathustra-like attempts at making sense of a world beyond the human, declaring in one version that \"no man can feel God until he becomes God\" (222). Whereas Jeffers's more celebrated work <em>The Tower Beyond Tragedy</em> deals with human consciousness through a \"death of the self\" that allows Orestes to be \"redeemed into a oneness with nature and its being\" (261), the Rev. Dr. Barclay in <em>The Point Alma Ve","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"70 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525608","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 Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Tracing Mexican American Environmental Concerns in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don","authors":"Anthony Gomez III","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912272","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 --> The Water-Energy-Food Nexus<span>Tracing Mexican American Environmental Concerns in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's <em>The Squatter and the Don</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Anthony Gomez III (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Introduction</h2> <p>When San Diego first received mountain water from the Cuyamaca Basin in 1889, government leaders celebrated and cheered for the expanded access to a water supply. No longer did the booming town's population have to depend on outmoded wells and dwindling reservoirs. To many, the moment represented a profound triumph and a chance for the city to develop, grow, and attract new residents. To Mexican author María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, however, news of the basin must have been cause for disappointment. Having long fantasized about establishing a reservoir and irrigation network of her own, the basin's success cemented an end to her ambitions to influence the government and better the economic situation of California's Mexican inhabitants. An unfortunate set of results was clear. Without power over the water, the Mexican population could not depend on their usual food supply, as their farmers were susceptible to a company and state that preferred to help and invest in Anglo farmers. Without the stable income from agriculture, there was no financing to lobby for their proposed railroad line. And without the pecuniary reward and trade benefit of a train line, there was no guarantee of future security for either food or water. The blue gold that disappeared from control proved a devastating blow to a Mexican-led infrastructure across the state.</p> <p>For a short moment in 1872, Ruiz de Burton's dream of bringing water to San Diego felt plausible (Sánchez and Pita 392). While geographer George Davidson of the University of California, Berkeley, <strong>[End Page 189]</strong> studied and assessed her plans, Ruiz de Burton waged a public campaign in <em>The San Diego Union</em> newspaper to persuade locals to her cause. Over the next decade, the author ventured to Capitol Hill, speaking before Congress to defend and assert the necessity of her visions for infrastructure (Crawford). Despite her efforts, political support and public morale were lacking. San Diego, known mostly for locals that were \"sin dinero y sin fe,\" did not seem worthy of investment from either state or federal channels (qtd. in Sánchez and Pita 392). Her plans, though revived for a brief spell in 1882, did not come to fruition (392). Worse yet, in the following decade San Diego would boom due to funding and capital given to Anglo individuals and corporations, many of which were created to resolve the same problems she discussed in her writings and speeches. San Diego would have a new reservoir in 1875 and the network to bring water from the Cuyamaca Basin would first be announced in 1885 (\"February 22, 1889\").</p> <p>It is ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"33 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525611","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":"Tall Tale and Anti-Capitalist (Post) Western Storytelling in Douglas Coupland's Generation X","authors":"Junwu Tian, Yingjie Duan","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912274","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 --> Tall Tale and Anti-Capitalist (Post) Western Storytelling in Douglas Coupland's <em>Generation X</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Junwu Tian (bio) and Yingjie Duan (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In an interview with <em>Contemporary Literature</em>, Jon McGregor, an award-winning British novelist, mentioned Douglas Coupland as an influence on the use of storytelling as a pivotal narrative device in his own fiction: \"when I read <em>Generation X</em>, it seemed obvious to me that it had been completely misconstrued by most people, and rather than being this very hip survey of a generation it was actually all about storytelling and the importance of storytelling and the function of storytelling in a society\" (Edwards 221–22). Storytelling is indeed a conspicuous yet largely unacknowledged feature of Coupland's <em>Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture</em> (1991), a novel all-too-often labeled as a literary manifesto of the post-baby boom generation. In the novel the first-person narrator Andy and his partners, Dag and Claire, have left middle-class life to take up low-rent service industry jobs in Palm Springs, California, where they share autobiographical or whimsical stories. This oral story-sharing practice near a western desert is reminiscent of the extravagantly humorous \"tall tale,\" a form of orally transmitted literature common to the writings of the US frontier during the nineteenth-century westward expansion.</p> <p>Clearly, the vital and irresistible thrust of the frontier storytelling tradition persists in Coupland's novel as its fictional characters also revel in exchanging satirical or fantastical stories, but their white middle-class identity in the highly capitalist context of the 1990s is quite distinct from those western pioneers. The US West that Coupland confronts and contemplates has been shaped and colored by corporate capitalism, technocapitalism, and <strong>[End Page 249]</strong> postmodern conditions or, in William H. Katerberg's more specific words, by \"Hollywood, and Silicon Valley . . . military bases, atom bombs, trailer trash, dysfunctional families, designer kitsch, TV preachers, cookie-cutter suburbs, Microsoft, and plastic surgery\" (274). Coupland's West does cohere with what Neil Campbell has termed the \"American New West\" or the \"postmodern West\" rife with \"rampant technologies, extreme commodification, cosmetic surgery, nuclear landscapes, pollution, and simulation <em>as well as</em> the persistent, traditional stories of 'freedom,' 'choice,' and new starts associated with the region\" (275; emphasis original). In other words, the US West or the Postwest in the late twentieth century (and possibly in the ensuing decades) is at the same time laden with the historical, regional myths of Edenic agriculturalism, expansionism, and upward mobility, and troubled by the fresh, complex, and multiv","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"10 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525630","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":"Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century by Kai Bosworth (review)","authors":"Sebastian Braun","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a912278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a912278","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"4 1","pages":"278 - 280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139344559","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 Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer by John Joseph Mathews (review)","authors":"Alexander Steele","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904157","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer by John Joseph Mathews Alexander Steele John Joseph Mathews, The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer, edited and with an introduction by Susan Kalter. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 287 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30; e-book, $30. Composed of seventeen unpublished short stories written mostly between 1945 and 1951, this remarkable collection that Susan Kalter has brought together reveals a fascinating and unexpected side of John Joseph Mathews. Most readers familiar with Mathews know him for his meticulous nonfiction in classic works like Talking to the Moon (1945) and The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961). His literary reputation has rested until now on his only novel, Sundown (1934), a complex “mixed-blood” bildungsroman that has received renewed critical attention in recent years, particularly within Native, multiethnic, and modernist studies. Whereas Sundown grounds itself firmly in the land of Osage County, most of the stories here, as Kalter comments, are perhaps best thought of as “travel stories” (47), albeit of considerable varieties. As a kind of variation on travel stories, there’s rapid movement within and across Mathews’s short fiction. The collection presents a kaleidoscope of genres, locales, dialects, characters, and action that will no doubt be of interest to researchers and readers of Native American literature, as well as those of twentieth-century American fiction more broadly. The Short Stories certainly “reveal a dimension of [Mathews’s] writing and thinking as yet unrecognized” (xii). In fact, Mathews’s overall range may be the most surprising and [End Page 172] rewarding component of Kalter’s rich recovery. Readers may smirk at mock Westerns like “Too Small for a Horse” and then dive into irony drenched political satires like “The Liberal View,” a story in which Mathews clearly has a good time taking aim at oxymoronic bourgeois (American) “Marxists” blind to their own socioeconomic privilege. Only a short time later Mathews shape-shifts once again and begins experimenting with speculative (or what Kalter calls “futuristic”) fiction in baffling stories like “Natural Science,” a kind of “World War Three antithriller” (191) involving a mysterious “Sun-Bomb” that apparently supplants its atomic predecessor in the hands of the off-kilter scientist turned “Supreme Commander” of “Westeurope,” General Joe Higgins (226). Kalter’s editorial work is also deft and illuminating. Her introduction and footnotes strike an enviable balance in tone that speaks equally to scholars and general readers. But what synthesizes this sometimes unwieldy set of stories are Kalter’s four section introductions for the “Westerns,” “Travel Stories,” “Stories from Indian Country,” and “Stories of World War II and the Cold War.” Taken together, her editorial efforts weave historical, contextual, archival, and biographical information with subtle gestures to","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"256 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145069","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 Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West by Stephen J. Mexal (review)","authors":"Matthew Evertson","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904156","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West by Stephen J. Mexal Matthew Evertson Stephen J. Mexal, The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. 364 pp. Hardcover, $120; e-book, $45. This wide-ranging exploration of the influence of the frontier West on American conservatism begins with a question of cowboy hats. Why did Ronald Reagan wear one? George W. Bush? Beyond the Stetsons, how did such symbols of the West come to underpin modern conservatism, particularly in its aesthetic appeal, the stories, symbols, values, and “habits of mind” that Mexal argues would later form the core of what he calls “practical conservatism.” Politicians still exploit these “romantic and accessible” aesthetics because they tend to “pluck conservatism free of its modern entanglements with racism, classism and authoritarianism” (vii). The introductory chapter, “The Old Iron Days,” lays out this study in five parts, from the development of the myths and images of “winning the west” (as Theodore Roosevelt wrote it) to where it concludes, with Roosevelt in the White House and the rest of the main players in the study ensconced in high-profile positions of the eastern establishment, secured in some ways by their “fitness” demonstrated in their western adventures. Mexal outlines how modern conservatism builds upon these “aesthetics,” particularly in the belief that western expansion had built an interior “skill set” that the country would need going forward, after the closing of the frontier, and those images and myths so strongly associated with [End Page 169] the “old iron days” became useful in the modern age for embodying conservative ideals. Evolution had selected the most tenacious and self-reliant men to “settle” the frontier, but as the country came into its own manifest destiny, Mexal argues, these rugged individuals with their exploits and myths gave way to a conservative promise fulfilling the “old Jeffersonian dream of an America led by a naturally selected aristocracy” (3). Such aesthetics focused on: . . . belief in the absolute power of the individual; an orientation towards maintaining the historical status quo; a sense that society should be ordered by the laws of nature; a feeling that certain rules apply to some groups more than others; an innate suspicion of collectivism; a faith that inequality is not just acceptable but natural; and a belief in a hierarchical society. Those ideas came to life with vivid clarity when these men told stories about the hazards of the American west. (7) Which men? Roosevelt, of course, and Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, Buffalo Bill Cody, and others whose influences are not always as apparent as those colorful western legends (Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, Charles Darwin and his evolutionary cohort of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Herbert Spencer, and, near the end of ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145072","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":"Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts ed. by Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson (review)","authors":"Alison Turner","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904154","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts ed. by Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson Alison Turner Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson, eds., Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts. Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2021. Paper, $39.95; e-book, $39.95. In Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts, editors Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson collect essays and other material on three—only three!—Erdrich novels. They frame Erdrich’s justice trilogy, The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016), as “directly connected by the force and the friction of Indigenous people wanting to hold onto their home-lands and preserve their traditions and communities in the face of settler colonialism” (xi). The collection compellingly explores this shared foundation, with eight essays grouped into three (unmarked) umbrellas that the editors describe as “injustices in the trilogy,” “the move from trauma to healing,” and “Ojibwe culture and language as healing ways to restore balance and effect justice” (xviii–xix). Essays focus on trees, dogs, grief, decolonization, language, narrative complexity, genre, and more; some explore one of the three novels, others the trilogy at large; some consider the contexts of Erdrich’s worlds while others look at what the editors call “the texture of Erdrich’s craft” (xvii). The collection is a rain barrel in the storm of Erdrich’s writing: see how small any container will be, see how wild the storm! Committed Erdrich readers might be distracted by how the barrel overflows. What about Tracks (1988), a novel whose central theme [End Page 165] is land dispossession? Or Four Souls (2001), and its protagonist’s persistence for land reclamation? And, for readers who can keep up with Erdrich’s publishing schedule, what about The Sentence (2021), whose formerly incarcerated protagonist deliberately committed one crime at the same time she was framed for another, and whose survival of the carceral system is perhaps Erdrich’s most direct engagement with “justice”? What does it mean to study how justice operates in only one part of a complex whole? But that’s just the fun of being an Erdrich scholar and fan. Another storm is always already on its way, and it will change the look of the land, sometimes for an afternoon, sometimes forever. Perhaps to acknowledge that essays alone cannot satisfy thirsty Erdrich readers, Jacobs and Peterson end the collection with other forms of material. Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton contribute a new version of their project of charting and indexing Erdrich’s fictional worlds, this time focusing on the trilogy in particular. Readers well acquainted with Erdrich’s ecosystem of characters, histories, and setting—and the delightful possibility that we might at any time encounter someone or something familiar in a new novel—might be frustrated by this pinning down of that which perhaps cannot be, and, f","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145091","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":"Cuban Quartermoon by Ann Putnam (review)","authors":"Sarah Driscoll","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904160","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Cuban Quartermoon by Ann Putnam Sarah Driscoll Ann Putnam, Cuban Quartermoon. Seattle: Skylight Press, 2022. 341 pp. Paper, $16; e-book, $8.99. Ann Putnam’s Cuban Quartermoon chronicles central protagonist Laura Gallagher’s trip to Havana, Cuba, for an Ernest Hemingway conference, traversing both time and place as she navigates traumatic memories from her past. Replete with a ragtag cast of Hemingway scholars and aficionados from both the United States and Cuba, Putnam’s novel highlights Cuba as an integral setting—and Hemingway as a critical author—for Laura’s psychological and cultural awakenings. The novel also cements the relationship between the American West and the Caribbean, with consistent flashbacks to life in Seattle and St. Louis, where Laura painfully processes, in Havana time, the loss of her mother, daughter, and marriage. Perhaps just as important is the novel’s delineation and reminiscence of signature Hemingway sites in Cuba: Hemingway’s Cuban home, Finca Vigía; Cojímar, the small fishing town that became the setting for Hemingway’s classic, The Old Man and the Sea; and the famed hotel Ambos Mundos, where Hemingway wrote some of his best works, such as For Whom the Bell Tolls, in the 1930s. While the novel’s central plot is defined by Laura’s traumatic memories of her mother’s mental illness, her daughter’s death, and the end of a marriage, the novel positions Hemingway as emblem-atic of the intersections between and among the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and the Caribbean. Hemingway’s memory also serves, as late as the 1990s, as a bridge builder; his works and life in Cuba pave the way for protagonist Laura’s ability to process her pain, reconcile her demons, and find comfort and healing in the presence of his memory. Moreover, the novel explores how Americans from the West see Cuba. The narrative positions Cuba as a site of the uncanny, a Caribbean trope the novel foregrounds when Laura feels threatened by the Bodeguita man when she explores Santería practices and when she travels through a Conrad-esque “cave of the mind” in Pinar del Río. At no point does the reader sense that Americans in Cuba are truly safe, and this quasi–Heart of Darkness motif, while perhaps accurate, is one of the novel’s more troubling representations. So, while the novel endearingly portrays mother-daughter relationships and Cuban women as nurturers, survivors, [End Page 179] scholars, and writers, Cuba is defined by a heavy dose of romantic and lusty desire (solidified by Laura’s affair with psychiatrist Michael), conflated with enigmatic and threatening contexts that tend to reinforce some of the myths about Cuba that surface in American narratives from the perspective of Westerners. While the novel focuses heavily on the relationship between the American West and Cuba, its value rests, too, in its exploration of US scholars in Cuba, the relationships those scholars have not only with each other but with Cuban scholars, who are equal","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145074","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 Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre ed. by Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol (review)","authors":"Daniel Pinti","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904161","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre ed. by Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol Daniel Pinti Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol, eds., The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 328 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30; e-book, $30. The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre is one of those books that is both a pleasure and a challenge to review. The pleasure comes from how much one learns when reading this collection of essays. The challenge comes from both the book’s overall excellence—reviewers often fear appearing too effusive in their praise—and its all-but-overwhelming scope. Ten essays by an international array of scholars collectively touch on the Western genre in comics form from the Americas to Europe to Japan. Together, the editors and authors make a compelling case for the intrinsic interest and global importance of the comics Western. The book opens with an introduction by the editors that contextualizes this book within some of the most influential and provocative books in comics studies, particularly works by scholars focused on comics canonization and high/low art distinctions (e.g., Bart Beaty, Benjamin Woo, Qiana Whitted). No less crucially, it also places the book in dialogue with contemporary concepts in Western studies, such as Susan Kollin’s work on the postwestern and Neil Campbell’s “rhizomatic west.” Touching on global studies and translation studies as well, not to mention building in a succinct global history of the comic book Western, the introduction effectively serves as a microcosm of the book and leaves one unsurprised that, as the authors assert, “the study of comic book Westerns is growing” (6). The rest of the book is divided into two parts, each made up of five essays. Part 1, “Transnational Histories,” includes essays by the editors—Christopher Conway’s “Comic Book Westerns and the Melodramatic Imagination in Mexico,” and Antoinette Sol’s “Blueberry: Remaking the Western in Franco-Belgian Bandes desinées”—as well as Simone Castaldi’s “Italian Western Comics and the Myth of the Open Frontier,” Johannes Fehrle’s “German Western Readers and the Transnational Imagination,” and Marek Paryz’s “Beyond Parody: Polish Comic Book Westerns from the 1960s through the 2010s.” These last three function, in various ways, as wide-ranging surveys of their respective subjects, with [End Page 181] Fehrle’s being especially interesting in how it charts some of the competition and interplay between East German and West German comics, as well as between comics imported to Germany from other European countries and those produced by German artists. In contrast, Conway and Sol, respectively, have written more deeply focused essays, with Conway offering a transmedial study of El libro vaquero (first published in 1978) in light of Mexican film melodrama, and Sol introducing the reader to the widely influential series Blueberry (first publi","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145073","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":"American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West by Lynn Downey (review)","authors":"Stephen P. Cook","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904163","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West by Lynn Downey Stephen P. Cook, lecturer emeritus Lynn Downey, American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2022. 222 pp. Paper, $24.95; e-book, $19.95. American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West reveals author Lynn Downey’s skills as a historian and provides a very detailed overview of dude ranches in America. Her scholarship is extraordinary, allowing Downey to take the reader into an arcane subculture of Americana, beginning in the late nineteenth century around Cody, Wyoming, and spreading throughout the West and moving from there to California and the East Coast. She takes us to Las Vegas, Nevada, and the dude ranches where clientele waited for divorces to become final. She shows Hollywood’s treatment of the dude ranch, dramatizing the interactions between owners of the ranches, wranglers working on those ranches, and the dudes and “dudines” who have come to recreate. Downey even gives us a look (so to speak) at Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch. In southwest South Dakota where I live, the dude ranch is alive and well; for example, High Country Guest Ranch is just down the road in Hill City, and a consortium of family ranches called Northwest Nebraska High Country is only a few counties away. All offer a menu of experiences from tipi camping to star gazing to equestrian activities to the essence of the dude ranch experience, western food and plenty of it (no kale allowed). Chefs are as important [End Page 185] or perhaps more so than the horse wranglers, a reality that allows the cook to be a bit feisty at times and apt to walk out. Some ranch owners circumvent that possibility by keeping food preparation in the family as they do with so many other activities and services. Downey also does an excellent job of tying dude ranches to cultural landmarks: the ethos of the West, open space, the landscape, western clothing, and the experience of being on horseback and on the trail. As mentioned, she shows the ways in which Hollywood, the interpreter of all things Western in America, gives motion, verisimilitude, and drama to the Dude Ranch Experience. Still, as I read on I began to quibble with the author’s approach, seeing within her presentation warrants needing explanation. For example, what role in the American imagination does the West play? Why do Americans and others come to dude ranches beyond having a good time? How much of the experience is role-playing, and what emotional and/or psychic needs are met? How do the tangibles connect to the intangibles during a dude ranch stay? Downey mentions City Slickers but dismisses it as simply not a true dude ranch portrayal. Still, the core of the movie is the transformation going west offers to three men who have arrived at plateaus in their lives and needing to have those lives renewed. The change promised by going west was and is the most central th","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145067","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}