Books in the Postwestern Horizons series

We Who Work the West examines literary representations of class, labor, and space in the American West from 1885 to 2012.

The pioneering essays in Teaching Western American Literature give instructors entree into the classrooms, syllabi, and assignments of leading scholars in the field.

Since the re-publication of her novel "The Squatter and the Don", Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832-95) has become a key figure in the recovery of nineteenth-century Mexican American literature. This work fetaures essays that appraise a politically complex Mexican American writer.

Lee Clark Mitchell takes a position against those critics looking to attach ""post"" to the all-too-familiar genre. For though the frontier disappeared long ago, though men on horseback have become commonplace, and though films of all sorts have always, necessarily defied generic patterns, the Western continues to enthrall audiences.

The test of western literature has invariably been Is it real? Is it accurate? Authentic? This work proposes a wholesale rethinking of the critical terms and contexts - and thus of the very nature - of western writing. Why is western writing virtually missing from the American literary canon but a frequent success in the marketplace?

Synthesizes topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West. This work examines subjects ranging from the use of frontier rhetoric in Japanese American internment camp narratives to the emergence of agricultural tourism in the New West to the application of geographer J B Jackson's theories to vernacular or abandoned western landscapes.

Brings a much-needed perspective to Deadwood's representation of the frontier West

In this innovative study, Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins, John Blair Gamber examines urbanity and the results of urban living - traffic, garbage, sewage, waste, and pollution - arguing for a new recognition of all forms of human detritus as part of the natural world and thus for a broadening of our understanding of environmental literature.

"Captivating Westerns examines the contact and conflict between the United States and the Middle East in the introduction, production, and circulation of the film and literary Western, and the racial politics embedded in the various versions and revisions of the Western genre"--

At every turn in the development of what we now know as the western, women writers have been instrumental in its formation, yet the myth that the western is male-authored persists. Westerns: A Women's Historydebunks this myth once and for all by recovering women writers of popular westerns active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Through all its transformations and reinventions over the past century, "Sin City" has consistently been regarded by artists and cultural critics as expressing in purest form, for better or worse, an aesthetic and social order spawned by neon signs and institutionalized indulgence. In other words, Las Vegas provides a codex with which to confront the problems of the West and to track the people, materials, ideas, and virtual images that constitute postregional space.Morta Las Vegas considers Las Vegas and the problem of regional identity in the American West through a case study of a single episode of the television crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Delving deep into the interwoven events of the episode titled "4 4," but resisting a linear, logical case-study approach, the authors draw connections between the city--a layered and complex world--and the violent, uncanny mysteries of a crime scene. Morta Las Vegas reveals nuanced issues characterizing the emergence of a postregional West, moving back and forth between a geographical and a procedural site and into a place both in between and beyond Western identity.

Since World War II, the American West has become the nation's military arsenal, proving ground, and disposal site. Through a wide-ranging discussion of recent literature produced in and about the West, Dirty Wars explores how the region's iconic landscapes, invested with myths of national virtue, have obscured the West's crucial role in a post-World War II age of ""permanent war"".

Employing the ideas of critics such as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Ranciere, Neil Campbell examines the haunted inheritance of the Western in contemporary US culture. His book reveals how close examination of certain postwar films reconfigures our notions of region and nation, the Western, and indeed the West itself.

Using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the rhizome, this book shows how the West (or west-ness) continually breaks away from a mainstream notion of American "rootedness" and renews and transforms itself in various cultural forms.

Examining the social and cultural implications of noir and Western narratives in video games, Manifest Destiny 2.0 explores the performative literacy of gaming as a means by which Western and noir genres continue to influence twenty-first-century attitudes and global culture.