This text employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions - political, racial, sexual, social and religious - which have beset modern America from "Stagecoach" and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. The book focuses on a group of great Westerns, showing how they engaged covertly with such issues as miscegenation, labour-management relations, generational discord, codes of masculinity, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, increasing individual social alienation, and explains why a celebratory genre veered, during a generation of unprecedented power and prosperity, from sagas of national achievement to bleak, virtually asocial visions of life in the United States.
- ISBN10 1860642594
- ISBN13 9781860642593
- Publish Date 31 December 1998 (first published 31 December 1997)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Imprint I.B. Tauris
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 260
- Language English