Western Literature

The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary phenomenon. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.

This book begins in a narrow territory, strictly Western, and extends with the passage of time to include the poetry, plays, novels, and works of speculation of the great authors of the past and present, from Russia to Mexico. His objective is to tell the whole story of Western writing in languages other than English from the twelfth-century Chanson de Roland to Evtushenko's poetry of the 1960's.Cohen not only presents a factual account of historical growth. The book reflects the author's own judgments and valuations, arrived at in the course of almost forty years' reading in the main European languages. A work of original criticism, "A History of Western Literature" immediately became a standard reference when first published. In this new edition, the author has included revisions covering the most important recent writers and their work.

The literary critic defends the importance of Western literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Kafka and Beckett in this acclaimed national bestseller. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD Harold Bloom's The Western Canon is more than a required reading list—it is a “heroically brave, formidably learned” defense of the great works of literature that comprise the traditional Western Canon. Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the essential writers of the western literary tradition (The New York Times Book Review). Placing William Shakespeare at the “center of the canon,” Bloom examines the literary contributions of Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Pablo Neruda, and many others. Bloom's book, much-discussed and praised in publications as diverse as The Economist and Entertainment Weekly, offers a dazzling display of erudition and passion. “An impressive work…deeply, rightly passionate about the great books of the past.”—Michel Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

In works of Western literature ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the giving and taking of hospitality is sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of our greatest writings, including Christ’s Last Supper, Macbeth’s murder of his royal guest, and Camus’s short story on French colonialism in Arab Algeria. By means of such examples and many more, this book considers what literary hosts, hostesses, and guests do to as well as for each other. In doing so, it shows how often treachery rends the fabric of trust that hospitality weaves.

In this collection of twelve essays, the editors attempt to define the poet as prophet in Western literature and to select the general attributes of prophetic writing. The essays focus, in the main, on the prophetic tradition in the English-speaking world, as well as on a sufficient number of writers outside that tradition, to prove that all prophetic writing shares common features.

"Many fictional works have real, historical authors as characters. Great national literary icons like Virgil and Shakespeare have been fictionalized in novels, plays, poems, movies, and operas. This fashion might seem typically postmodern, the reverse side of the contention that the Author is Dead; but this collection of essays shows that the representation of historical authors as characters can boast of a considerable history, and may well constitute a genre in its own right. This volume brings together a collection of articles on appropriations of historical authors, written by experts in a wide range of major Western literatures."--BOOK JACKET.

A reissue in paperback of a title first published in 1949.