We Who Work the West: Class, Labor, and Space in Western American Literature (Postwestern Horizons)

Kharpertian, Kiara

ISBN 10: 1496208846 / ISBN 13: 9781496208842

Published by University of Nebraska Press, 2020

About this Item

No marks in text. Not a library book. Ships in a cardboard enclosure. One copy only of this title. Tim's Used Books, open shop in Provincetown, Massachusetts, known for good books at reasonable prices since 1991.

Seller Inventory # 240170

Bibliographic Details

• Title: We Who Work the West: Class, Labor, and Space in Western American Literature (Postwestern Horizons)
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496208846
• ISBN 13: 9781496208842
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

We Who Work the West examines literary representations of class, labor, and space in the American West from 1885 to 2012. Moving from Marķa Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s representations of dispossessed Californio ranchers in the mid-nineteenth century to the urban grid of early twentieth-century San Francisco in Frank Norris’s McTeague to working and unemployed cowboys in the contemporary novels of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, Kiara Kharpertian provides a panoramic look at literary renderings of both individual labor—physical, tangible, and often threatened handwork—and the epochal transformations of central institutions of a modernizing West: the farm, the ranchero, the mine, the rodeo, and the Native American reservation.

The West that emerges here is both dynamic and diverse, its on-the-ground organization of work, social class, individual mobility, and collective belonging constantly mutating in direct response to historical change and the demands of the natural environment. The literary West thus becomes more than a locus of mythic nostalgia or consumer fantasy about the American past. It becomes a place where the real work of making that West, as well as the suffering and loss it often entailed, is reimagined.
 

About the Author

Kiara Kharpertian (1985–2016) received her PhD in English from Boston College, specializing in American literature and environmental studies. Carlo Rotella is a professor of English at Boston College. Christopher P. Wilson is a professor of English at Boston College.