Harry Callahan famously remarked that ‘a man’s got to know his limitations’, but in the history of American cinema no star director has remained as topical or as significant as Clint Eastwood. The depth and scope of Eastwood scholarship and research matches his status, exposure, and longevity. However, its daunting quantity (and variable quality) makes it difficult to discriminate the useful from the tendentious, superficial, and otiose. Now, this new four-volume Routledge collection, compiled by Laurence Knapp, author of one of the first critical studies of Eastwood’s work, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a vast literature and a continuing explosion in research output. Users will now be able easily and rapidly to locate the best and most influential critical scholarship, work that is otherwise often inaccessible or scattered throughout a variety of specialist journals and books.

The major works gathered here embrace issues such as ‘gender, masculine lack and anxiety’ and interrogate Eastwood as a symptomatic object of American identity. Other themes include mortality, female subjectivity, post-colonialism, and existential despair brought on by war and ecological disaster. With key materials gathered into one easy-to-use set, researchers and students can now spend more of their time with crucial journal articles, book chapters, and other pieces, rather than on time-consuming (and sometimes fruitless) archival searches.

The collection is also supplemented with a comprehensive introduction newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context.