True West and Lying Marks:The Englishman's Boy, Blood Meridian, and the Paradox of the Revisionist Western
| Autor: | David R. H. Evans |
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| Rok vydání: | 2013 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 55:406-433 |
| ISSN: | 1534-7303 0040-4691 |
| Popis: | It is difficult, by all evidence, not to write a western. The canonized titans of the genre produced on a scale to match the immensity of the open plains tirelessly traversed by their lonely heroes. Zane Grey, after abandoning the claustral confines of a dentist’s office, quickly found that pulling stories from his brain was easier than pulling teeth from others’ jaws, writing some fifty-six westerns in the course of his career (Blaha 949). Frederick Faust despised the novels he wrote under the pseudonym Max Brand; nevertheless, the “Shakespeare of the Western range” would commit to paper a staggering thirty million words, the equivalent, his biographer Robert Easton calculates, of 530 “ordinary books” (vii), before his death at the age of fifty-two. Their literary descendant Louis L’Amour would prove a worthily productive successor. In the 1950s, his contract with Bantam called for three westerns a year, and his bibliography would eventually list well more than seventy frontier fictions (Bloodworth, “Louis L’Amour” 956; “Writers” 58). If it is not precisely true to say that the western writes itself, it appears fair to suggest that the conventions of the genre are so potent and fecund that the individual author assumes a role less like that of a seminal genius than of a startled midwife, assisting at a seemingly perpetual parthenogenesis. The power of the western’s narrative conventions can be detected not only in the fertility of the genre, however, but also in the way in which they |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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