The weird, weird West? This anthology of remarkably readable academic monographs examines the subversive possibilities of the Old West in literature and on screen. Most of the essays cite recent examples of how the “masculinist” genre, with a history of explicit racism and implicit support for genocidal empire building, can be turned on its head. Many of the examples come from science fiction (“Westworld,” “Firefly”); others wonder whether America’s frontier literature was always a bit gothic, haunted by the absence of Natives and Blacks as fully embodied actors in the drama of a new nation in the New World.
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