William W. Savage – författare
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2 produkter
2 produkter
216 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Like most other serious students of American popular culture, William W. Savage, Jr., believes that by examining our heroes we learn about ourselves. In The Cowboy Hero he takes as his subject the cowboy of myth, dime novel, wild West show, legend, Hollywood, museum, and television.With an introductory discussion of the elusive historical cowboy and an occasional return to his real world to keep the reader in balance, Savage reviews the cowboy hero in his various guises-as a cowboy doing the work of cowboys (seldom), as musician, as performer on state and in wild West shows, and above all as a man's man, the object of whose affections is most generally his horse (other objects of the historical cowboy's affections are courageously alluded to).Then there is the cowboy the purveyor of macho cigarettes, sugarcoated cereal (""the historical cowboy was the very picture of malnutrition, but the cowboy hero might well hold a degree in home economics, so ardent is his praise of brand-name foodstuff""), coughdrops, painkillers, barbecue sauce, and laundry detergent. ""No matter how much the American people revere their heroes or tout their myths,"" says Savage, ""they will sell them all to any buyer and at nearly any price."" The approach is topical rather than media-oriented, though it is largely through the cowboy's media appearances that we come to know and love him.With the (no doubt temporary) absence of the cowboy from the television screen, the cowboy hero is today most revered as rodeo performer-participant in a sometimes brutal sport that has nothing to do with cowboying. The author's description of the young western boy's initiation into the sport turns little-league horror tales into bedtime stories. The inevitable result of all this is summed up in the title of the last chapter, ""A Bore at Last.""This book, often funny and expectable ironic but with a serious purpose, is bound to raise the hackles of the followers of the cowboy cult and others whose most lasting perceptions of the American West evolved from childhood cereal serials, B-movie horse operas, and latter-day television epics (did anyone ever actually see Hoss and Little Joe ride a fence line?). The fact is that, as Savage says, this book is, in the end, less about cowboys than it is about you and me.
244 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Indian Life: Transforming an American Myth reveals the varying views and representations of Native people that whites confronted, as they made their relentless way across America's Great Plains from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. William W. Savage, Jr., emphasizes the images of American Indians that whites developed - to justify their expansion into Indian lands, salve their consciences, and romanticize the West, and to attract more whites. Indian Life reveals the political uses of these myths.At various times American Indians were characterized as bloodthirsty savages, then noble sons of nature. Indians were objects of curiosity in Wild West shows, but the ""real"" Indians failed to emerge. Conflicting images offered by travelers, missionaries, and government workers - bent on their own objectives - were later reinforced in novels, motion pictures, and television.Savage examines views of American Indians from the 1800s to the early 1900s, including those of such widely read mythmakers as Richard Irving Dodge, Richard Harding Davis, Helen Hunt Jackson, and James Willard Schultz, to ""identify both the things that were and the things that were thought to be. They are neither pretty nor sentimental.""Indian Life: Transforming an American Myth is a book for anyone concerned with the historical and cultural dimensions of American Indians and the whites who conquered their ""sea of grass.""