Word Rides Again: Rereading The Frontier In American Fiction

With much recent scholarship polarizing frontier novels into popular and literary camps, The Word Rides Again challenges the critical orthodoxy that such works have little in common, arguing that even the most formulaic Western fictions can subtly (and even subversively) share cultural concerns with their more highbrow brethren. Focussing on writers that have been largely classified as either popular or artistic, each chapter reads a different fictional work against prevailing scholarly trends. In this manner, Bret Harte’s sentimentally excessive stories become gender-bending experiments where women assume male roles and even enjoy lesbian relationships. Owen Wister’s The Virginian is transmuted from a misogynistic diatribe into a complex meditation on the peculiarly American relation of violence to male identity. And even Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, rather than the apotheosis of a religious leader, becomes a somewhat standard version of the popular frontier story. The Word Rides Again reaffirms a delicate continuum between popular and literary texts and explores the ways that a variety of frontier novels have echoed, endorsed, and inverted each other from the inception of the genre.