The Crowded Prairie
American National Identity in the Hollywood Western
Published on 31. December 1998
Book
Paperback/Softback
260 pages
978-1-86064-259-3 (ISBN)
Description
This text employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions - political, racial, sexual, social and religious - which have beset modern America from "Stagecoach" and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. The book focuses on a group of great Westerns, showing how they engaged covertly with such issues as miscegenation, labour-management relations, generational discord, codes of masculinity, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, increasing individual social alienation, and explains why a celebratory genre veered, during a generation of unprecedented power and prosperity, from sagas of national achievement to bleak, virtually asocial visions of life in the United States.
Reviews / Votes
Michael Coyne...heft[s] his pickax in search of intellectual nuggets..."The Crowded Prairie's" real strength lies in Coyne's passion. "The Washington Post"More details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
College/higher education
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
16 b&w illustrations, filmography, bibliography, index
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
476 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-86064-259-3 (9781860642593)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Michael Coyne is a writer and film historian. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Content
Mirror for pre-war America - "Stagecoach" and the Western, 1939-1941; puritan paradigms - "My Darling Clementine" and "Duel in the Sun"; "The Lonely Crowd", Catholicism and consensus on the prairie - "Red River", "Fort Apache" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon"; dysfunctional family structures in classic westerns, 1950-1961 - "The Gunfighter", "Shane", "The Searchers" and "The Last Sunset"; politics and codes of masculinity in late 1950s star westerns - "The Big Country" and "Warlock"; "No More West to Win" - "How the West Was Won" and the elegiac westerns of 1962; a genre in flux, a nation in turmoil - the Vietnamization of the western in mid-1960s America; receding frontiers, narrowing options - "The Wild Bunch" and the western in Richard Nixon's America; legends revisited, legends revised in "Bicentennial Westerns" - "Buffalo Bill and the Indians", "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "The Shootist".