New Book Release

Critical Perspectives on the Western

Critical Perspectives on the Western: From A Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield). Edited by Lee Broughton.

For decades, the Western film has been considered to be a dying cinematic form, yet filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Ethan and Joel Coen have found new ways to reinvigorate the genre. As Westerns continue to be produced for contemporary audiences, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the relevance of this enduring genre. In Critical Perspectives on the Western, Lee Broughton has compiled a wide-ranging collection of essays by international scholars that look at various forms of the genre, on both the large and small screen. The contributors to this volume consider overlooked subgenres, Western stars, celebrities and authors, recent idiosyncratic engagements with the genre, and Westerns produced outside of the USA. These essays also explore issues relating to culture, politics, transnationalism, postcolonialism, race and gender that are found within the films under discussion.

Contents:

'Zapata-Spaghetti: reflections on the Italian Western and the Mexican Revolution' by Christopher Frayling

'The Fantastic Frontier: Sixguns and Spectacle in the Hybrid Western' by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper

'Gunfight at the Transvaal Highveld: Locating the Boerewors Western in Southern Africa' by Ivo Ritzer

'Rethinking the Representation of Race and Gender in American Exploitation Westerns from the 1960s' by Lee Broughton

'Contemporary obsession with the inexplicable nature of evil as expressed in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford' by John White

'A Cop in a Cowboy Hat: Timothy Olyphant, a Postmodern Eastwood in Justified' by Jenny Barrett

'“Going Blood-simple”: Red Harvest in Film' by Jesús Ángel González

'A solitary theme song from a 21st Century Western' (Appaloosa) by Pete Falconer

'“The Unheightened Moment”: Work, Duration, and Women’s Point-of-View in Meek’s Cutoff' by Timothy Hughes

'Glorious Basterds in Tarantino’s Django Unchained: When the West Crosses the South' by Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris

'Cross-cultural hybridity and the Western: Tears of the Black Tiger' by Thomas Klein

'Thawing Out The Frozen Limits' by Geoff Mann

'“Spaghetti Savages”: the cinematic perversions of Django Kill' by Mark Goodall