|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
How America Went West
| Article
# : |
14594 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
2,111 Words |
| Author
: |
David Hallman
David Hallman teaches English at James Madison University |
SELLING THE WILD WEST:
Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960
Christine Bold
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987
215 pp., $27.50
The story is familiar and seems old. A tall, dark stranger (unless he is short, blond, and Alan Ladd) rides into town; he discovers corruption galore and a damsel in distress, but sets everything to rights, kisses his horse, and rides off into the sunset. At least that is the version most Americans have come to expect according to the almost ritualistic formula for the popular culture genre of the American Western--film or fiction--although there are variations. But while the story line is familiar, it only seems old. What most readers think of as Western literature began to develop only after the Civil War, as the opening of the West captured the popular imagination and became the great American romance.
The mythologizing of the Western adventure had begun earlier, of course, when in the 1820s, James Fenimore Cooper began chronicling in his own fanciful way the westward passage from the Eastern seaboard in his Leatherstocking Tales, but it was not until the crisis of the war had passed that Americans at large--and Europeans, for that matter--became enamored of what would become our native American myth. In the evolution from dime novels and cheap pulp fiction, through a kind of quasi-legitimate literary development, to the classic cinematic expressions of American cowboy movies, the Western has become probably the most universal of American images. That this should be so obviously true in itself says
... (1994 of 12853 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
