FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

The Western (Paradoxa, number 19)
Editor: Homer B. Pettey
ISBN: 1-929512-13-9
ISSN: 1079-8072
Date of publication: 2004
Published by Delta Productions
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A reckless, wild spirit accompanies the myth of the West. Westerns remind American popular culture of its own untamed character, which, of course, is a profound myth; rarely do Western images have much to do with historical truths. Western tropes convey attitudes that are recognized, even if misattributed, as part of the American national characters. Whenever the Western seems to have disappeared over the cultural horizon, it emerges again in other genres that rely upon its formulas and that resurrect its symbols and their meanings. It appears that the American psyche can never rid itself fully of its most cherished, self-generating myth.

Concerning the penchant for violence and death in this most American genre, Lee Clark Mitchell has made clear in his analysis of corporeal and cultural imagery that the Western "has always celebrated a certain neurological impulse, verging ever on the edges of death, invoking violence only to show how the restrained, fetish-laden body is not to be deprived of life but made to stand as a desirable emblem of masculinity, as a self-contained, animated (if finally inanimate) object." (Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 172).

Western images of violence or potential violence often work their way into contemporary films. In them, the term "cowboy" often refers to a malevolent, racist type of behavior that results in violence.The invocation of the cowboy conjures up a history of racial injustice, segregation, the Klan, lynchings, and church-bombings. Cowpoke as madman, the Westerner as psychotic, the cowboy as rogue killer-these images of criminality permeate American culture. Associating urban outlaws with the Western has a long history in American popular culture. In contemporary films, that loner who once had been the hard-boiled figure now becomes a sociopathic anomaly, often in Western garb.

However the language of the Western may be reconfigured in the rhetoric of violence, essays in this collection indicate that the Western formula is not as rigid as many suppose, and its application to diverse modes of behavior and morality make it clear that the West, the frontier, and the cowboy are integral to the American linguistic construction of itself.

One cannot escape the image of Owen Wister's horseman in The Virginian. He is everywhere. His persistence is as enduring as the West itself. He represents so many facets of the very perplexing American self-image that it is difficult to identify him with only one. He pervades so much of our culture that we cannot, as Wister thought, place him in the past. He is forever a part of the elusively changing American present.

-- Homer B. Pettey, Editor

Contents of Paradoxa #19:

Essays

Homer B. Pettey

Enduring Western Imagery in Popular Culture

John Cawelti

Myths and Fantasies of the West

Harry Brown

"A Scorned Outcast Thing": Mixed-Blood Outlaws in the Dime Novel

Paul Reddin

The Cowboy's Twisted Trail from Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee to Playboy Magazine

Eric L. Reinholtz

Buster Keaton's Cervantic Westerns: Subversion of the Six-Gun Mystique

Jennifer Lei Jenkins

The Mexican Revolution as Western Vengeance Quest: Azuela's Los de Abajo

Lee Clark Mitchell

Why Monument Valley? (And Why Again and Again?): John Ford's Stagecoach and the Landscape of Time

John Lenihan

The Searchers: Now and Then

Corless Smith

Done in by Demographics: Why the Western Rode into the Sunset

Homer B. Pettey

Sacred Sites of Violence in the Western: Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch

Charles Sherry

"The Theater of His Life": Wild Bill Hickock's Amor Fati...

Fred See

Larceny, Swindle, Drought, Fire, Earthquake, Plague, Riot, Murder, Rape,Incest: Los Angeles as our Western Frontier

Interviews

Walon Green

Paradoxa Interview by Homer Pettey

Max Evans

Paradoxa Interview by Homer Pettey

Reviews

Jennifer Lei Jenkins

Return of the Vanishing Native American

Gretchen Ronnow

Legends of the Hollywood West

Carmen Ortiz Henley

The Enigmatic John Ford, Western Director

Jennifer Lei Jenkins

What Lies Beneath

Joanna Hearne

Singing Cowboys, Minstrel Songs: A Review of Peter Stanfield's Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail

Gretchen Ronnow

Positing Western History

Bibliography

Homer B. Pettey

Selected Bibliography on the Western and the West, and Selected Filmography on the Western Film and Television Series

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