West Words

West-words gives the reader a bird's-eye view of the contemporary theatre scene across the prairies.

Here are the moving stories of these young pioneers, told in their own words through letters home, diaries, and memoirs.

Western Words has 5,000 words of cowboy language as vibrant now as it was in the old American frontier. "Within the cowman's figures of speech lie the rich field of his subtle humor and strength-unique, original, full-flavored. With his usually limited education he squeezes the juice from language, molds it to suit his needs, and is a genius at making a verb out of anything. He 'don't have to fish 'round for no decorated language to make his meanin' clear, ' and has little patience with the man who 'spouts words that run eight to the pound.' Perhaps the strength and originality in his speech are due to the solitude, the nearness of the stars, the bigness of the country, and the far horizons-all of which give him a chance to think clearly and go into the depths of his own mind. Wide spaces 'don't breed chatterboxes.' On his long and lonely rides, he is not forced to listen to the scandal and idle gossip that dwarf a man's mind. Quite frequently he has no one to talk to but a horse..." -from the author's Introduction

Fifteen-year-old Weston Newcomb is fairly surprised when he passes the early entrance exam into the university at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in May of 1943. But the escape from his home in Loris is welcome. Skipping his senior year at a small town high school, West is now somewhat at a disadvantage, both in youth and in education at this large university. In his first class, he encounters a strangely antagonistic professor, a specialist in Thomas Wolfe, who complicates his life. However, his classmates give him a much broader education. Each new acquaintance seems to have lived a life startlingly different from his own. Self-centered and solipsistic but hungry for skills to serve others, West encounters a gamut of friendships as he stumbles, fumbles, and struggles toward social and sexual adulthood. Counterpoint to his progress are the guns of World War II. Nazis have invaded Poland, the Japanese have struck Pearl Harbor, and atrocities engulf the planet. Only gradually does West perceive the importance of the war. He integrates personal growth and a discovery of authoritarianism at its worst. He experiences the dark midnight of FDR's death and the bright noon of war's end. He finds his chance for manhood in a world he must help to rebuild. West learns that war is hell, but so is growing up.

Indian Removal was a process both physical and symbolic, accomplished not only at gunpoint but also through language. In the Midwest, white settlers came to speak and write of Indians in the past tense, even though they were still present. Winning the West with Words explores the ways nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans used language, rhetoric, and narrative to claim cultural ownership of the region that comprises present-day Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Historian James Joseph Buss borrows from literary studies, geography, and anthropology to examine images of stalwart pioneers and vanished Indians used by American settlers in portraying an empty landscape in which they established farms, towns, and “civilized” governments. He demonstrates how this now-familiar narrative came to replace a more complicated history of cooperation, adaptation, and violence between peoples of different cultures. Buss scrutinizes a wide range of sources—travel journals, captivity narratives, treaty council ceremonies, settler petitions, artistic representations, newspaper editorials, late-nineteenth-century county histories, and public celebrations such as regional fairs and centennial pageants and parades—to show how white Americans used language, metaphor, and imagery to accomplish the symbolic removal of Native peoples from the region south of the Great Lakes. Ultimately, he concludes that the popular image of the white yeoman pioneer was employed to support powerful narratives about westward expansion, American democracy, and unlimited national progress. Buss probes beneath this narrative of conquest to show the ways Indians, far from being passive, participated in shaping historical memory—and often used Anglo-Americans’ own words to subvert removal attempts. By grounding his study in place rather than focusing on a single group of people, Buss goes beyond the conventional uses of history, giving readers a new understanding not just of the history of the Midwest but of the power of creation narratives.

Word-lovers rejoice! This fascinating book reveals the amazing and bizarre histories of language's building blocks. "A sorcerer of language".--"Publishers Weekly".

Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form.

Mhumhi, a young painted dog, has always been certain of one thing: that the dogs rule the city, and that the few remaining humans are helpless against them. When his unconventional pack takes in two small children, however, he doesn't realize that everything he thinks he knows is about to be unraveled. Mhumhi and his children are captured and taken below the city by the mysterious bouda, a group of humans with strange ties to spotted hyenas. These humans are not helpless: in fact, they threaten to upset the balance between dogs and humans. But Mhumhi has more than that to worry about. Soon he will have to make a choice- should he continue to make his human children a part of his dangerous life, or should he entrust them back to their own kind? He'll have to decide fast, because as the city's food supply dwindles, darker machinations are beginning to stir, and to escape them Mhumhi and his pack may have to go beyond the city for the first time.