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Western American Literature
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.114

Number of Followers: 5

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ISSN (Print) 0043-3462 - ISSN (Online) 1948-7142
Published by U of Nebraska

[32 journals]

Tall Tale and Anti-Capitalist (Post) Western Storytelling in Douglas
Coupland's Generation X
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  Abstract: In an interview with Contemporary Literature, 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 Generation X, 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 Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), a novel all-too-often labeled as a literary manifesto of the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
A Turn in the Fog: Gertrude Atherton Reads Henry James
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  Abstract: 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, Adventures 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" (Adventures 375).This ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Tracing Mexican American Environmental
Concerns in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don
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  Abstract: 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 ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
The American Western in Canadian Literature by Joel Deshaye (review)
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  Abstract: 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 ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties by Suzanne Roberts
(review)
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  Abstract: The opening essay to Suzanne Roberts's latest collection, Animal Bodies, 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 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. ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen
Lands by Margaret D. Jacobs (review)
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  Abstract: 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 The Hesperian (July 1859), the first successful women's literary magazine published by women west of the Rockies, the unnamed ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century
by Kai Bosworth (review)
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  Abstract: Pipeline Populism presents simultaneously an account of the fight against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines and political musings about a philosophical problem: how can a movement be popular without being populist, or perhaps, how can the radical environmental left embrace populism without becoming nationalist and counterrevolutionary' In the narrative sections, Bosworth succeeds in writing an engaging account of resistance, teeming with great insights and anecdotes. The political reflections, however, are simultaneously obscure to the average reader and rendered largely irrelevant because they are so jargon-infused that they do not express a clear point.The description and analysis of giving testimony at ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North
American West by E Cram (review)
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  Abstract: The opening to E Cram's Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West 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. Violent Inheritance builds on previous scholarship surrounding vitality and its use in discourses on racial and sexual degeneracy. Using the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
A Black Woman's West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon by Michael K. Johnson
(review)
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  Abstract: A Black Woman's West 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 ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American
West by Lawrence P. Jackson (review)
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  Abstract: 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 The Outlaw Josey Wales (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 The Outlaw Josey Wales ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Cather and Opera by David McKay Powell (review)
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  Abstract: Cather and Opera delivers much more than the title implies. Though David McKay Powell presents comprehensive analyses of the author's references to opera and of her employment of operatic devices—from her early short stories to her later novels—he also offers insightful commentary about Cather's life and work. Cather scholars need not have an interest in opera to find the book fascinating, though opera aficionados will appreciate Powell's vast knowledge of the art form's history in America and nuanced discussions of various operas and composers. (If you don't know opera, keep a dictionary handy for terms like "verismo" and "coloratura soprano.")After a chapter providing an overview of Cather's multilayered ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global
Community by Neil Campbell (review)
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  Abstract: 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 ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape
Photography by Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad (review)
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  Abstract: Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography depicts the curatorial collaboration between Shannon Eagan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad. This book is accompanied by an exhibition featuring photographs by pioneer Norwegian photographer Knud Knudsen and Danish photographer Sophus Tromholt. Both Knudsen and Tromholt were based in Bergen, Norway, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this book Eagan and Fjellestad create a cross-cultural dialogue that explores the complex relationships between photography, landscape, and national identities as well as humankind's relationship to nature.Across The West and Toward the North features eleven essays by contemporary art ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts by Robinson Jeffers (review)
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  Abstract: For an American poet who read at the Library of Congress and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine 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. The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts, 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 ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote by
Megan Riley McGilchrist (review)
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  Abstract: 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 ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
The True Account of Myself as a Bird by Robert Wrigley (review)
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  Abstract: 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.But turn to the penultimate poem ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
2023 WLA Award Recipients
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  Abstract: Distinguished Achievement AwardFor an influential scholar or creative writer in western American literatureMark Trahant, Editor-at-Large for Indian CountryDelbert & Edith Wylder AwardFor outstanding service to the associationSusan Bernardin, Oregon State UniversityThomas J. Lyon Book AwardFor most outstanding book published last year in western American literary and cultural studiesChadwick Allen, University of Washingtonfor Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts(University of Minnesota Press)andChristine Bold, University of Guelphfor "Vaudeville Indians" on Global Circuits, 1880s-19030s (Yale University Press)Don D. Walker PrizeFor best essay published in western American literary studies ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
58th Western Literature Association Conference
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  Abstract: Hope in a Hogan © Ryan Singer, 2022Speculative Territorializations of New West LiteraturesTucson, Arizona El Conquistador Hilton ResortOctober 2–5, 2024As President of the Western Literature Association for 2023, I am thrilled to announce that the WLA Conference for next year will take place from October 2–5 in Tucson, Arizona. Situated on ancestral Tohono O'odoham lands known as Cuk-Son and nicknamed "the Old Pueblo" by subsequent settlers, we were able to secure the Hilton El Conquistador Resort as our conference venue. Located in the Sonoran Desert in the foothills of the spectacular Santa Catalina Mountains, this site amplifies any perceptions inspired by these layered geographic and spatial significations. ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-11-18T00:00:00-05:00