Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West [Paperback]

In one consequential volume, Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West presents the cross-section of a fast-changing and greatly expanded field. Through interdisciplinary essays, this volume on the post-national West challenges the idea of a unified national story sustained by strategic exclusions. Contributors analyze the economic and environmental exploitation depicted in working-class Western literature, emphasize the transnational by approaching both the North/South and cross-Atlantic axes grapple with the role of Mormons, and dissect the new masculinity of Silicon Gunslingers. Each essay successfully and compellingly models a new and fruitful way of engaging the West.Electronic Pioneers and Silicon Gunslingers: Constructing Histories of the U.S. Computer Industry; J.Sartain From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley; R.Crooks American Outsiders at the Center: Mormons and the West; R.Heinze Middlebrow Readers and Pioneer Heroines: Willa Cather's My Antonia ; B.Streeter Aldrich's A Lantern in Her Hand and the Popular Fiction Market; M.Homestead

The variety of provocative approaches, new critical inquiries, and challenges to comfortable but worn ways of thinking embodied in this collection returns to us a variety of American Wests that have much to tell us about our multiple pasts and our various futures. - Great Plains Quarterly

These essays expand one s understanding of western terrain through multiple axes: geographical, political, historical, and cultural. The contributing scholars challenge the received knowledge of the West, offering valuable revisions to concepts like transnationalism, the working class, popular culture, and the canon. This collection does not simply crisscross borders: it engages them, wrestles with them, redefines them, even defies them. Dyck and Reutter offer up a new literary atlas of the West and in doing so redraw the map of western Aml3!