The Revision of the Western in E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times

Abstract

N the late 1950S and the early I96os, many writers beginning their literary careers grew convinced that the existing artistic conventions of the novel were no longer viable, since the realistic aesthetic of the nineteenth century, the modernist experimentation of the early part of the twentieth, and the liberal and existential novel of the period after World War II all seemed either limiting or impoverished. Some of the work of reinvigoration of the novel undertaken by this new generation of writers can be related to Roman Jakobson's theory that as a form of literature evolves there is a shift in the hierarchy of within it, so that in times of change genres which were originally secondary paths, subsidiary variants, now come to the fore, whereas the canonical are pushed toward the rear. 1 In the revitalization of fiction that occurred in the I96os, in fact, one important trend, which emerged in opposition to the aristocratic cultu'ral theory of the modernist period, centered on the assimilation into mainstream literature of such ephemeral as science fiction, the detective story, pornography, and the western, which were employed by the new writers with great literary sophistication and were made to yield meanings relevant to their contemporary world.2 The popular western attracted the attention of young writers in the I96os not only because of this general shift in literary trends but also because, in the sociopolitical climate of the times, the vision of the west which such works projected invited ironic