Westerns: Paperback Novels and Movies from Hollywood

Product Description Whatever we might think of them, popular Westerns, both movies and cheap paperbacks on the newsstand racks, have had a powerful impact on both U.S. culture and Western European culture in general. Collected here are new studies from a variety of critical approaches of popular Westerns by scholars from the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, new studies of classic William S. Hart, John Ford, Clint Eastwood, and Sam Peckinpah film Westerns as well as new studies of seldom studied writers such as James Warner Bellah, Clarence Mulford, Charles Portis, and Oakley Hall. About the Author This collection is a timely intervention into current debates about art, history, feminism and visual culture. Coming at the moment when contemporary art practices are themselves involved in re-cycling, re-evaluating and re-enacting the past, it asks how feminisms own troubled histories can be reframed productively in the present. The questions that feminism raised in the 1970s and 80s are still pertinent, and are addressed in a number of original essays: What does gender equality mean in the arts? How can womens subjectivities be articulated or performed differently in art practices? Can attention to gender enable us to engage with complex differences of race, sexuality and class, of age and generation? Do we need new interpretative and conceptual models for writing about art? Alexandra Kokolis thoughtful and illuminating introduction reminds us that reframing is a risky but exciting business if it makes us ask these questions anew, with attention to the politics and aesthetics of the present. Feminism Reframed demonstrates how the fraught and fertile relationship between feminism and the visual arts continues to produce challenging art historical scholarship that demands and engages our attention. Rosemary Betterton, Lancaster University