Reckoning with Western Nostalgia

The essays contained in this special issue of Comparative American Studies range across time and media, from outdoor recreation and magazines in the Gilded Age of the 1870s, to video games, film, and television in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, taking in theme parks and heritage sites along the way. They are a reminder of the pervasiveness of the nineteenth-century historic West as a powerful and enduring symbol in American culture. At the same time, they each offer a distinctive perspective on the relationship between the making of popular nostalgia and the shifting symbolic meaning of the West, illuminating the malleability and vital mutability of Westerly ideas to national cultural identity. Along the way, they question some long-standing assumptions both about nostalgia and about Western exceptionalism, and meanwhile describe the broadening expressions of Western nostalgia, as its themes migrated from the pages of magazines and story books onto cinema screen and into play and interactive media. They offer contrasting visions of the West, too, from nostalgia for the idealised wilderness or the days of the pioneer to celebrations of an altogether different West, shaped by technological modernity in the twentieth century. At each turn, it becomes apparent that the nostalgic dreams of one generation have flowed into those of the next and the next; that the West has long been a dream of a dream. Thus, far more so than simply a wish to return to an actual, particular time and place, Western nostalgia has often expressed a desire for things lost in the modern, standardised world. The conquest and colonisation and settling of the West was after all a geographically dispersed process. It is telling that much Western nostalgia refers back to an approximate time and place, or that specific events become, when viewed through this retrospective lens, mythologised as illustrative of a larger, vague historical moment. The West is the stage for those dreams. Here, it may be significant that Western nostalgia has often been attached to a fleeting moment in national history. Perhaps the Old West continues to exercise such a powerful hold on the American imaginary because it was a time we know, from our own vantage point as nostalgic observers, was destined to pass, an exception in time. It might be imagined as a place apart from the urban, industrial world, with organised society always just outside, about to encroach. Just as we might recall our own feelings of personal loss that we experienced as a child, when a childhood sense of wonder and adventure gave way to the disenchantment of adulthood, as we were reshaped in the standardising and regulating institutions of education and labour, the West, as myth, can speak to us. The Old West can in this way symbolise our own very personal feelings and connect them to a larger, shared national memory and want of a pioneer adventure.