The Western

The Western
Author: Jeffrey M. Wallmann
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780896724235

Wallmann's sweep through the western is a careful, incisive, and blessedly non-theoretical examination of the implications of the western from the beginning to the present, taking the reader deep into the heart of the subject and offering original and perceptive theories of how the western reflects the evolution of America."--BOOK JACKET.

The Dime Novel Companion

The Dime Novel Companion
Author: J Randolph Cox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2000-05-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0313095361

This encyclopedic guide to the American dime novel contains over 1,200 entries on serial publications, major writers and editors, publishers, and major characters, fiction genres, themes, and locales. An introduction provides a brief history of the dime novel. A discussion of dime novel scholarship includes a selected directory of libraries and museums with significant collections of dime novels. An appendix contains a publishing chronology of the more than 300 serial publications, and a selected bibliography suggests further reading. This comprehensive reference will appeal to popular culture scholars and to dime novel collectors. As an important research tool, entries are cross-referenced throughout. An index is included.

Kit Carson and the Indians

Kit Carson and the Indians
Author: Thomas W. Dunlay
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2005-05-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780803266421

Portrayed by past historians as the greatest guide and Indian fighter in the West, Kit Carson has become in recent years a historical pariah--a brutal murderer who betrayed the Navajos, and an unwitting dupe of American expansion, and a racist. Many historians now question both his reputation and his place in the pantheon of American heroes. Here we are urged to reconsider Carson yet again. Carson was a man of the nineteenth century, whose racial views and actions were much like those of his contemporaries.

Kit Carson

Kit Carson
Author: David Remley
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2011-05-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 080618325X

History has portrayed Christopher "Kit" Carson in black and white. Best known as a nineteenth-century frontier hero, he has been represented more recently as an Indian killer responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Navajos. Biographer David Remley counters these polarized views, finding Carson to be less than a mythical hero, but more than a simpleminded rascal with a rifle. Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man strikes a balance between prevailing notions about this quintessential western figure. Whereas the dime novelists exploited Carson's popular reputation, Remley reveals that the real man was dependable, ethical, and—for his day—relatively open-minded. Sifting through the extensive scholarship about Kit, the author illuminates the key dimensions of Carson's life, including his often neglected Scots-Irish heritage. His people's dire poverty and restlessness, their clannish rural life and sternly Protestant character, committed Carson, like his Scots-Irish ancestors, to loyalty and duty and to following his leader into battle without question. Remley also places Carson in the context of his times by exploring his controversial relations with American Indians. Although despised for the merciless warfare he led on General James H. Carleton's behalf against the Navajos, Carson lived amicably among many Indian people, including the Utes, whom he served as U.S. government agent. Happily married to Waa-Nibe, an Arapaho woman, until her death, he formed a lasting friendship with their daughter, Adaline. Remley sees Carson as a complicated man struggling to master life on America's borders, those highly unstable areas where people of different races, cultures, and languages met, mixed, and fought, sometimes against each other, sometimes together, for the possession of home, hunting rights, and honor.

The Age of Dimes and Pulps

The Age of Dimes and Pulps
Author: Jeremy Agnew
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-07-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 147663257X

From the dime novels of the Civil War era to the pulp magazines of the early 20th century to modern paperbacks, lurid fiction has provided thrilling escapism for the masses. Cranking out formulaic stories of melodrama, crime and mild erotica--often by uncredited authors focused more on volume than quality--publishers realized high profits playing to low tastes. Estimates put pulp magazine circulation in the 1930s at 30 million monthly. This vast body of "disposable literature" has received little critical attention, in large part because much of it has been lost--the cheaply made books were either discarded after reading or soon disintegrated. Covering the history of pulp literature from 1850 through 1960, the author describes how sensational tales filled a public need and flowered during the evolving social conditions of the Industrial Revolution.

The Creation of the Cowboy Hero

The Creation of the Cowboy Hero
Author: Jeremy Agnew
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2014-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 078647839X

As business interests have commercialized the American West and publishers and studios have created compelling imagery, the expectations of readers and moviegoers have influenced perceptions of the cowboy as a hero. This book describes the evolution of the cowboy hero as a mythic persona created by dime novels, television and Hollywood. Much of our concept of the cowboy comes to us from movies and the book's main focus is his changing image in cinema. The development of the hero image and the fictional West is traced from early novels and films to the present, along with shifting audience expectations and economic pressures.

The Dime Novel Western

The Dime Novel Western
Author: Daryl Jones
Publisher: Popular Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1978
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Traces the development of the western dime novel form from its source in early nineteenth-century fiction through to its full manifestation in the late 1800s. Daryl Jones focuses on the development of character types (backwoodsman, plainsman, outlaw, and cowboy), the settings, the structures, and the plots of this form.