Description
Book SynopsisContemporary Cowboys: Reimagining an American Archetype in Popular Culture expands and develops an understanding of recent cultural shifts in representations of the American cowboy and “the West” as vital components of American identity and values. The chapters in this volume examine they ways in which twenty-first century representations have updated the figure of the cowboy, considering not only traditionally analyzed sources, such as television, film, and literature, but also less studied areas such as comics, and music. The authors probe the cowboy archetype and western mythology with critical theory, feminist critiques, philosophy, history, cultural analysis, and more.
Trade ReviewContemporary Cowboys offers a rich portrait of a shape-shifting American archetype in the twenty-first century. These scholars approach the frontier and the cowboy in many mediums and from a diverse array of disciplinary perspectives. Far from dying out, the Western rides on in new and surprising forms.
-- Josh Garrett-Davis, Autry Museum of the American West and author of What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The Gaucho in a Globalized World
Adam Barkman & Enzo Guerra
Chapter 2.: The Philosophy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Judge Holden and
Heraclitus
Jerold J. Abrams
Chapter 3: Horse Sense: Discerning a Dialectic of Human Relations from Buck
and The Rider”
Jennifer L. McMahon
Chapter 4: Should’ve Been a Cowboy’: Changing Yet Stable Representations of the
Cowboy in Modern American Country Music
Gillian Kelly
Chapter 5: Can You Hear Me? Springsteen’s ‘Outlaw Pete’ as American ‘Hero
Lilian Haney and John Thompson
Chapter 6: “I Can’t Go Back”: The Re-imagination of Space in Feminist Westerns
Karen Adkins
Chapter 7: They Forgot to Put in the Quit’: Representations of Whiteness and
Foundation Myths in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”
Misty L. Jameson
Chapter 8. Slow Cowboys and New Men: Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and
First Cow
Wendy Chapman Peek
Chapter 9. Rewriting the Western Myth: Marcia Muller’s Private Eye on California
Cindy Hamilton
Chapter 10. The Lone Wolf and the Wild West: How Private Eyes Became the New Cowboys”
Dahlia Schweitzer
Chapter 11. Disarming the Lone Cowboy: A Return to an Authentic West in The Wild
Bunch and Deadwood”
Mark Walling
Chapter 12. Semiotic Landscapes and Fallen Heroes: Repurposing the Myth of the West in Westworld
Caroline Collins
Chapter 13.Graphic Evolutions: Imagining the Cowboy-as-Archetype in Contemporary Comics
Clint Jones
