Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West

Nicolas S. Witschi is Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of English, Western Michigan University. He is the author of Traces of Gold: California’s Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature (2002), a Western Writers Series monograph on Alonzo “Old Block” Delano (2006), and various articles and essays on Mary Austin, John Muir, Sinclair Lewis, and Henry James.

"Wonders abound in this indispensable book, the widest survey of the new scholarship of the multiple American Wests yet produced. Summing Up: Essential. All readers." (Choice, 1 November 2011)

• Notes on Contributors viii Part I: Introduction 11 Imagining the West 3Nicolas S. WitschiPart II: Regions and Histories 112 Exploration, Trading, Trapping, Travel, and Early Fiction, 1780–1850 13Edward Watts3 Worlds of Wonder and Ambition: Gold Rush California and the Culture of Mining Bonanzas in the North American West 29Peter J. Blodgett4 The Literate West of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals 48Tara Penry5 A History of American Women’s Western Books, 1833–1928 63Nina Baym6 Literary Cultures of the American Southwest 81Daniel Worden7 Literary Cartography of the Great Plains 98Susan Naramore Maher8 The Literary Northern Rockies as The Last Best Place 115O. Alan Weltzien9 North by Northwest: The Last Frontier of Western Literature 130Eric Heyne10 Chronotopes of the Asian American West 145Hsuan L. Hsu11 African American Literature and Culture and the American West 161Michael K. Johnson12 Mythical Frontiers: Manifest Destiny, Aztlán, and the Cosmic Race 177John L. Escobedo13 Writing the Indigenous West 191Kathleen Washburn14 Framing Class in the Rural West: Cowboys, Double-wides, and McMansions 213Nancy Cook15 Postcolonial West 229Alex Hunt16 New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest 244Krista ComerPart III: Varieties and Forms 26117 What We Talk About When We Talk About Western Art 263Brian W. Dippie18 “All Hat and No Cattle”: Romance, Realism, and Late Nineteenth-Century Western American Fiction 281Gary Scharnhorst19 The Coyote Nature of Cowboy Poetry 297Barbara Barney Nelson20 “The Wind Blew Them Away”: Folksinging the West, 1880–1930 316David Fenimore21 Autobiography 336Gioia Woods22 Housing the American West: Western Women’s Literature, Early Twentieth Century and Beyond 353Cathryn Halverson23 The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree: Western American Literature and Environmental Literary Criticism 367Hal Crimmel24 Detective Fiction 380Nicolas S. Witschi25 The American Western Film 395Corey K. Creekmur26 Post-Western Cinema 409Neil CampbellPart IV: Issues, Themes, Case Studies 42527 America Unscripted: Performing the Wild West 427Jefferson D. Slagle28 Revising Public Memory in the American West: Native American Performance in the Ramona Outdoor Play 443Karen E. Ramirez29 Omnimedia Marketing: The Case of The Lone Ranger 462Chadwick Allen30 The Nuclear Southwest 483Audrey Goodman31 Ranging over Stegner’s Arid West: Mobility as Adaptive Strategy 499Bonney MacDonald32 The Global West: Temporality, Spatial Politics, and Literary Production 514Susan Kollin33 Tumbling Dice: The Problem of Las Vegas 528Stephen Tatum and Nathaniel LewisIndex 547