Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film - Hardcover

Mitchell, Lee Clark

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18 ratings by Goodreads

9780226532349: Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226532348 ISBN 13: 9780226532349

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

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Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, Mitchell shows how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark study shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man.

"Elegantly written. . . . provocative . . . characterized by [Mitchell's] own tendency to shoot from the hip."—J. Hoberman, London Review of Books

"[Mitchell's] book would be worth reading just for the way he relates Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child to the postwar Western."—The Observer

"Integrating a careful handling of historical context with a keen eye for textual nuances, Mitchell reconstructs the Western's aesthetic tradition of the 19th century."—Aaron M. Wehner, San Francisco Review

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From the Back Cover:

Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, Mitchell shows how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture, including debates and nationalism, suffragetism, the White Slave Trade, liberal social policy, even Dr. Spock. At the same time, Westerns have addressed issues of masculinity by setting them against various backdrops: gender (women), maturation (sons), honor (violence, restraint), and self-transformation (the West itself). Mitchell argues, for instance, that Westerns repeatedly depict men being punished as pretext for allowing them to recover, restoring themselves once again to full manhood. In Westerns, a man must continually work at being a man. The most extensive study of Westerns to appear in twenty-five years, Mitchell's book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the genre as well as for students of film, masculinity, and American Studies.

About the Author:

Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres and Chair of the Department of English at Princeton University.

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