A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West [Hardcover]

• Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west
• Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions
• Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities
• Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies

Part I: Introduction 1

1 Imagining the West 3
Nicolas S. Witschi

Part II: Regions and Histories 11

2 Exploration, Trading, Trapping, Travel, and Early Fiction, 1780–1850 13
Edward Watts

3 Worlds of Wonder and Ambition: Gold Rush California and the Culture of Mining Bonanzas in the North American West 29
Peter J. Blodgett

4 The Literate West of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals 48
Tara Penry

5 A History of American Women’s Western Books, 1833–1928 63
Nina Baym

6 Literary Cultures of the American Southwest 81
Daniel Worden

7 Literary Cartography of the Great Plains 98
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