Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western American Culture

Book Overview

The book offers a diverse and rich picture of current research on the literature and culture of the American West. The book privileges transnational and interdisciplinary approaches, aiming to understand how Western iconography has moved well beyond both national limits and literary borders, becoming nomadic.

A selection of internationally renowned experts on Western American studies will consider the literary and artistic representation of the complex interaction between the mythic dimension of the West and its real, historical, social, and cultural features, both inside American culture and as it converses with other cultures.

The book also addresses other cultural and artistic manifestations that interact, overlap, and interrelate with Western writing in complex, often dialogic ways, as exemplified by cinema, art and comics; and it also explores how different voices and/or experiences have complicated and diversified the potential definitions of the American West.