Postwestern Cultures

by Kollin, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780803211148
• ISBN10: 0803211147
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

Postwestern Culturessynthesizes the most critical topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West within a single volume. This interdisciplinary anthology features leading scholars in the varied fields of western American literary studies and includes new regional studies, global studies, studies of popular culture, environmental criticism, gender and queer theory, and multiculturalism.Postwestern Cultures, like all successful studies of western American literature, is necessarily diverse and wide-ranging; it grasps the multifaceted quality of the landscape, literature, and critical analysis by engaging postmodern theory, spatial theory, cultural studies, and transnational and transcultural understandings of the local.This collection emphasizes the importance of understanding the region not as a confined or static space but as a constantly changing entity in both substance and form. It 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.

Author Biography

Susan Kollin is an associate professor of English at Montana State University and the author of Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier.

 

Contributors: Michael Beehler, Neil Campbell, Krista Comer, Nancy Cook, Audrey Goodman, Melody Graulich, Susan Kollin, Beth Loffreda, Lee Clark Mitchell, Capper Nichols, David Oates, John Streamas, and Stephen Tatum.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: Postwestern Studies, Dead or Alive	p. ix
Newer New Wests
Spectrality and the Postregional Interface	p. 3
Everyday Regionalisms in Contemporary Critical Practice	p. 30
Critical Regionalism, Thirdspace, and John Brinckerhoff Jackson's Western Cultural Landscapes	p. 59
Architecture and the Virtual West in William Gibson's San Francisco	p. 82
Nature and Culture
What's Authentic about Western Literature? And, More to the Point, What's Literary?	p. 97
Some Questions about Sexless Nature Writing	p. 115
Backpacking and the Ultralight Solution	p. 127
Survival, Alaska Style	p. 143
Contested Wests
Scheduling Idealism in Laramie, Wyoming	p. 159
Frontier Mythology, Children's Literature, and Japanese American Incarceration	p. 172
I'm Just a Lonesome Korean Cowgirl; or, Adoption and National Identity	p. 186
Cultivating Otowi Bridge	p. 206
The Romance of Ranching; or, Selling Place-Based Fantasies in and of the West	p. 223
References	p. 245
Contributors	p. 265
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