Western Fiction Research Articles

The Misrepresentation of Muslim Community in Post 9/11 English Fiction: A Political Analysis of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Terrorist

This study shows that Muslims tend to be negatively framed, and Islam is portrayed as a violent religion in the context of the 9\11 incident. The researchers have highlighted the issue of misrepresentation of Muslims and Islam in John Updike’s Terrorist and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. After 9/11, there came a transformation in the image of Muslims as they have been labelled as fundamentalists, fanatics, and terrorists. The study attempts to explore the politics of Western fiction after 9\11. The Muslims were held responsible for the happenings of 9/11, and this allegation was used as an excuse to augment the antagonism towards Muslims in the name of patriotic sentiments. Western fiction and media have been promoting this pseudo-patriotism since September 11, 2001. It has been depicted in such a biased way that it portrays America and the Western world as a victim of Islamic aggression and bigotry. Muslim bashing has become socially acceptable in the United States and European states. To carry out the analysis, the researchers chose the theory of social constructionism as a basic framework. The study is based on a qualitative research approach and has been carried out by textual analysis of the selected excerpts from the novels. The study attempts to make the world realize the fundamental reasons and core factors that perpetuate aggression and violence in Muslim states. Further, it highlights the main factors behind this intolerance and extremism worldwide. The findings reveal that the neo-colonial approach, imperialistic policies, and vested interests of the superpower breed hatred for it around the world, and such policies are not in favour of its land and people.

Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community by Neil Campbell (review)

Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community by Neil Campbell (review)

Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community. By Neil Campbell

Journal Article Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community. By Neil Campbell Get access Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community. By Neil Campbell (Reno & Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2022. 235 pp. Notes, references, index. $45.00, paper.) Michael Snyder Michael Snyder University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA msnyder@ou.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, whad065, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whad065 Published: 03 May 2023

Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says it’s a Dead Language? by Henryk Hoffmann

Reviewed by: Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says it’s a Dead Language? by Henryk Hoffmann Kristian L. Lorenzo Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says it’s a Dead Language? By Henryk Hoffmann. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2021. Pp. 306. Hardback, $61.00. ISBN: 978-1-62273-949-3. Henryk Hoffmann’s Latin in Modern Fiction: Who Says it’s a Dead Language? is not a book on literature but a reference book on the Latin language as presented in samples of modern fiction. In producing such a work, Hoffmann has both capitalized on his many years of teaching Latin in the US and played to his literary wheelhouse, since thus far he is the author of six other such works all of which, unlike the volume under review, focus on various aspects of the movie industry. In his conclusion Hoffman states that “The goal of this publication was to prove the prevalence of the Latin language in modern fiction by presenting pertinent references encountered in fiction books written in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries and set in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries” (255). By the terms “prevalence” and “pertinent” Hoffman means that the sheer number of his references, their presence in multiple genres and literary forms produced over so many years help to prove that Latin is not a dead language due to its ubiquity, popularity and hence importance. Hoffmann gathered these references over twenty-five years of reading (1995–2020) ca. 1200 works—approximately 220 of which contained Latin references—either chosen at random or for use in his other projects, and thus Hoffmann’s own literary taste is the key limiting factor. Those people familiar with James Joyce’s use of Latin references to embellish his prose can rest easy. This project does not duplicate the comprehensive coverage provided by R. J. Schork’s book, Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce (1997). In addition, Hoffmann considers it a modest supplement/addendum “offering numerous examples and further evidence in support of” the “amazing” conclusions Professor E. Christian Kopff sets forth in his book, The Devil Knows Latin: Why America needs the Classical Tradition (1999) (xviii-xix). The effect(s) of this last point will, of course, depend on how each individual familiar with Kopff’s book views the ideas expressed therein. As this reviewer has not yet read The Devil Knows Latin, I can say nothing further on this topic. After a list of figures and a preface Hoffmann presents his most pertinent references in forty-five entries subdivided by genre into three main parts: Latin in Mainstream Literature; Latin in Crime and Detective Fiction; and Latin in Frontier and [End Page 124] Western Fiction. Each entry is a whole unto itself but linked by helpful cross-references to other entries where necessary. Each one also contains erudite explanations and interpretations of the relevant Latin quotations. An appendix listing fiction books by other authors with minor/few Latin references and then a conclusions section follows the main parts. Acknowledgements, a bibliography and an index of only the Latin references quoted in the book itself close out this volume. It should be noted that there are neither footnotes nor endnotes and, as Hoffmann states in his acknowledgements, he made ample use of Wikipedia and IMDb to find and/or verify information regarding the authors of the books included in the entries. The three genre-driven main parts are where Hoffmann most clearly articulates his evidence. Part I, Latin in Mainstream Literature, contains twenty-one entries beginning with Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871–1958), ending with Dermot McEvoy (1950–) and including such well-known authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), John Steinbeck (1902–1968) and Umberto Eco (1932–2016). Part II, Latin in Crime and Detective Fiction, contains twenty entries starting with Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), stopping with Dennis Lehane (1965–) and including other important authors such as Brett Halliday (1904–1977), Tom Kakonis (1930–2018) and Elizabeth George (1949-). And Part III, Latin in Frontier and Western Fiction, is comprised of only four entries: Emerson Hough (1857–1920), Paul Horgan (1903–1995), Will Henry/Clay Fisher (1912–1991) and Larry McMurtry (1936-). This...

H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy as a Response to Post-9/11 Islamophobia and as Implicit Critique of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Western fiction about the 9/11 attacks tends to center white American experiences and perspectives and reinforce dominant Western stereotypes and misconceptions about Muslims, especially Muslim men. Counter-discursive post-9/11 fiction from a Muslim cosmopolitan perspective that seeks to intervene in these modes of representation inevitably has to contend with globally dominant epistemological frameworks of suspicion. While Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is among the most well-known of such counter-discursive fictions, this article focuses on H. M. Naqvi’s less well-known novel Home Boy (2009) to argue that Home Boy constitutes a postcolonial response to 9/11, an explicit critique of the ensuing American response and Islamophobia, and a tactical alternative to and implicit critique of Hamid’s novel. The article highlights some problems created by the narrative strategies Hamid uses and shows how Naqvi takes a different approach, in particular by foregoing the temptations of ambiguity and gender stereotyping and highlighting the multiple traumas experienced by Muslims from 9/11 and its aftermath. In so doing, the article suggests how critical readers can recognize both the drawbacks of Hamid’s celebrated novel and the alternative possibilities of other strategies that Muslim writers can use to address the problems of neo-Orientalism and global Islamophobia.

Aspects of Gothic Tradition in the Literary Imagination of Nnedi Okorafor

The Gothic writing has often been perceived as a form of Western fiction- making. This apparently is based on the fact that Gothic genre originated in Europe in the late 18th century and has been widely exploited in the West (Europe and North America). Contrary to these assumptions, it can be confirmed that Gothic mode has indeed been appropriated by many non–Western fiction writers. An in- depth interrogation of Nnedi Okorafor’s, selected novels like ‘Who Fears death’, Akata Witch and The Book of Phoenix reveal that she does indeed appropriate Gothic elements. This article therefore critically examines aspects of Gothic tradition in Nnedi Okorafor’s selected novels. It seeks to portray how unique Gothic motifs like monstrosity, villainy and morality have been appropriated, transformed and complicated in Nnedi Okorafor’s selected novels ‘Who Fears death’, ‘Akata Witch’ and ‘The Book of Phoenix’. This study found out that that the three motifs indeed exist in Okorafor’s selected novels and are closely related. Gothic Monsters are generally implicated in subversion of social norms and nature. This often renders them villainous and their defeat, as portrayed in the analysed texts, leads to a restoration of moral order in a given society. Yet the findings affirm that physical or moral monstrosity of a character does not necessarily qualify her or him to be a villain. Villainy is tied to innate monstrosity which manifests itself through characters’ inhuman, unjust, and oppressive attitude towards the perceived other. This piece therefore concludes that Nnedi Okorafor does indeed appropriate the Gothic motifs of monstrosity, villainy and morality in a manner that offers radically fresh means of highlighting Africa’s complex reality.

True North by Gary Eller

Reviewed by: True North by Gary Eller Hank Nuwer, emeritus Gary Eller, True North. Plymouth, MI: BHC Press, 2021. 376 pp. Hardcover, $30; paper, $17.95; e-book, 376. A common theme in American fiction identified by critic Max Westbrook is the motif of revolt-and-search. This is a story where the hero rebels against a man-made institution and catches hell from society for his integrity. Westbrook maintained that Western fiction authors often employ the revolt-and-search motif and thus are allied with the best American fiction. To that end True North vaults Gary Eller’s novel into the status of a North Dakota main event and an earned place on bookstore shelves with distinguished authors Louise Erdrich, Wallace Stegner, and Gerald Haslam. Eller blends the stories of four families subsisting in and near the Turtle Mountain Reservation. The four families experiencing [End Page 87] life and death on the rugged Dakota landscape are the Little Shays, Breens, Morinvilles, and Peaveys. It is the poor and unassuming character Harold Peavey who steals the show. Reminiscent of heroes Tom Joad and Jim Casey in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Harold stands up to the United States government in World War II because he believes war is pointless nonsense caused because a Kaiser or president was eager to waste thousands of lives for vainglory. Harold serves a long stretch in federal prison and comes home to be beaten to a pulp by a soldier on leave named Sergeant Dale Aingher, later destined to become the sheriff pitted against Harold’s son, torn in the sixties between deployment to Vietnam or flight to Canada. The meeting of Sheriff Aingher and Richie Lee Peavey establishes the book’s penultimate final scene. Funny, compelling, and disturbing, True North introduces us to characters who endure despite poverty and cruel Fate, and I cheer for them because of and despite their desperation. Particularly well drawn are the Sioux and Chippewa characters, especially the women who endure hardship, rape, and a local Catholic school bent on beating the Native out of Indigenous girls. His hardscrabble county in North Dakota reminds me of the brilliant depiction of the dwellers of Raintree County invented by Ross Lockridge Jr. Eller creates bleak characters with his engaging literary voice. This fictive voice lures his readers into one tragic situation after another. He is unabashedly funny even in scenes of trauma and tragedy. Life for residents on the blurred and disputed US–Canada border is nasty, brutal, short, and funny as hell. The novel does have a definite fault in my opinion. The most despicable characters might read as more authentic if Eller presented more of their good sides. Eller knows the landscape well. He was reared in the North Dakota community of Rolla and owns a cabin there. His late mother survived a twister inside her demolished home. Thus, his depictions of Dakota scenery are stunning and always connected to action on the page. His research from goat raising to North Dakota geography is extensive. A graduate of the MFA program at Iowa, Eller’s fiction deserves a significant fan base. Particularly compelling is the conflict between [End Page 88] Native Americans who try to keep alive the old ways and the younger generation scoffing at what they see as nonsense. Whether it is Indigenous Natives in North Dakota suffering exploitation or the struggle of Harold Peavey to stick to his beliefs in spite of reckonings, Eller’s chapters conjured up this reader’s tears and venom. Eller, the author of numerous published short stories, is a storyteller, a Bard of the Badlands, but no mere regionalist. He writes with an angry scowl, then softens his narrative with snicker after snicker. This novel demonstrates Eller’s justified anger in the tradition of two masters of the revolt-and-search motif, Edward Abbey and Kurt Vonnegut. Hank Nuwer, emeritus Franklin College (Indiana) work cited Westbrook, Max. “The Themes of Western Fiction.” Southwest Review, vol. 43, no. 3, 1958, pp. 232–38, www.jstor.org/stable/43470857. Google Scholar Copyright © 2022 Western Literature Association

A Glimpse of Newspaper Fiction from <i>Union Press</i> (<i>Nanyang Zonghui Xinbao</i>): 1924 to 1928

What we can expect for fiction from the Union Press in this period 1924-1928 under study was my primary concern when I carried out my research of fiction from the Union Press from 1917 to 1923. Contrary to my expectation, new political developments that took place in Chinese Mainland coupled with economic decline in Malaya affected the production of Singapore Chinese fiction writing; language change in the Sinophonic world plus the pressures from local newspaper competitors aggravated the sharp situation. In referring to tales of ghosts and foxes, surprisingly in this period under study, Liaozhai and Pu Songling were vividly associated. The Liaozhai imitation carried on with some innovations in scope, especially the fresh appearance of the plot of the black fox and its fur. Other rare demons such as morning glory and banana demons are included. It appears that the intention in publishing these stories changed from asserting belief to drawing attention to these parapsychological phenomena. As they are mythological and religious in nature, it legitimatizes the author of this paper to discuss them separately. Since the linguistic styles of wenyan and baihua by that time were getting closer, the emergence of more baihua stories signalled that a new scenario was about to emerge although lagging slightly behind. The wenyan fiction is more traditional or historical, while baihua stories are more contemporary with modern writing techniques. With Lin Qinnan’s translations of Western fiction into wenyan, the gap between wenyan and baihua fictional writings is somewhat narrowed. So it is logical to consider both forms together for discussion. The majority of stories are about love and marriage, including cross-racial marriages (although these are limited in number). Tragedies often occurred as new women clashed with traditional ethical thinking. War fiction which condemned the cruelty of fighting and disclosed human nature is touching as well. The editors shared their efforts in organizing the stories so that enhancement of meanings could be achieved. This is reflected in the affiliated information published here and there with an intention to explain, e.g., martial skills stories reflected the need for self-defence in all walks of life in the then chaotic China and overseas Chinese communities. The Union Press somehow carried on its innovative spirit in this period. Its innovation extended to some advertisements, which are significant in terms of art and theme. The classification of genre and sub-genre was meticulously rigid all along; after the disruption of the North Expedition, most classifications were abolished and some of the congtan or small talk columns were opened up to include foreign matters, as a result blurring certain distinctions.

Decolonising an Academic Literacy curriculum at the University of the Free State with creative writing: challenges and opportunities

As part of the first year Academic Literacy course at the UFS, students are required to study graded readers. The booklets are abridged versions of Western fiction, therefore these narratives reinforce the colonial presence in our curriculum. But South African students need to read local narratives in order to learn about each other – from each other. By taking part in the Initiative for Creative African Narratives (iCAN) students improve our curriculum by writing their own short stories so that they become contributors of material that will be graded and tested to form part of the UFS Academic Literacy curriculum. Thereby, students contribute to larger bodies of knowledge through their lived experiences. This paper reflects on the challenges and opportunities within the iCAN process.

Islam, Prejudiced Western Fiction and Islamic Feminism

Islam, Prejudiced Western Fiction and Islamic Feminism

Сюжет временный брак в русской литературе 1860–1910-х годов

The paper deals with the subject of temporary marriage between Russian sailors and Japanese women in fictional and non-fictional literature. The literary pattern of temporary marriage includes time limitation of the marriage, the language or/and cultural barrier and the man’s leaving at the end. The time limitation sometimes makes one or both spouses consider this marriage as legal, but “not true.” There are two main variants of the pattern in Russian travel notes of the 19th − early 20th century. The first is the positive one (A. Krasnov, D. Schreider, and N. Bartoshewsky). Both husband and wife are kind-hearted people, their family life is pure and real, although they do not entirely understand each other’s language. The second is the negative one (F. Knorring, D. Armfelt, G. de Vollan, and Vinogradov). Husband and wife are both pragmatic, rational, and cold, with the whole tradition turning into a sort of prostitution and insincere comedy. The plot variants, with one of the spouses being pragmatic, mercantile and cruel, and another loving, faithful, and suffering, are not common. Yuzhakov’s travel notes include such a rare case. The asymmetrical variant was more popular in Western fiction (Madame Butterfly). Russian fiction prefers the positive variant of the pattern. In short stories by D. Persky and M. Volkonsky, the authors transform the motives from Madame Chrysanthème by P. Loti and Madame Butterfly by J. L. Long by showing the Russians as noble people and achieving a happy end wherever possible.

From the Action-Packed Film to the Stealth Strategy: A Controlled Revolt against the Tradition of the Western in Desperados III

Desperados III is a stealth-strategy developed by Mimimi Games in 2020. The game tells the story of five outlaws who undertake hazardous activities in the Wild West. As regards its plot, setting and types of characters, Desperados III seems to follow the principles of formulaic western fiction and films. Yet the process of the western’s adjustment to the genre of tactical stealth has serious implications for the formula. The aim of the article is to discuss the game’s rebellion against the tradition of the genre. The paper is divided into four sections. They examine the game’s mechanics, its temporality, perspective and the construction of the virtual world in the context of the western’s adaptation to the stealth-based tactical strategy.

Rhetorical Self-Fashioning in Aramburu: A Contemporary Take on Cervantine Techniques

Author(s): Posey, Alison | Abstract: In Cervantes’ Don Quijote (1605), Dulcinea does not participate in any dialogue, and yet still appears a vivid character as real as the other female characters who do speak in the novel. Dulcinea, a figment of others’ imaginations, forms a sharp contrast with the character of Marcela, who fashions an authoritative self through dialogue with other characters. Marcela’s self, like Dulcinea’s, is relational to others’; however, her self-fashioning frees her from the objectification of Dulcineism and instead Marcela makes herself a character that transgresses conventional narratives, both cultural and literary. Likewise, a similar rejection of Dulcineism and a desire to craft her life story through her dialectical exchanges with the rest of the characters enables Miren, a principal female character in Aramburu’s Patria (2016), to fashion a self that actively contravenes the general perspective of her son’s supposed crimes as an etarra. In this analysis, I consider the Cervantine technique of rhetorical self-fashioning in characters such as Marcela and I trace this technique in the development of the character of Miren in Aramburu’s contemporary novel, Patria. Cervantes’ Marcela inaugurates the self-fashioning character in Western fiction, which is expanded by Aramburu four-hundred years later with his female character, Miren. Like Marcela, Miren must fashion herself against a polyphony of voices, frequently male, that provide a variety of narratives shaping the events of her life. I argue that Aramburu’s character, like Cervantes’, is empowered to author her own narrative to contravene an undesired outcome. Furthermore, both female characters use dialogue to reject the common literary tendency towards Dulcineism and, through relational rhetoric, disregard conventional narratives in favor of creating their own: a remarkable choice for female characters, both then and now.

Hesitant Empathy: Sun Baoxuan's Diary and Approaches to Reading Fiction in Late Qing China

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH OF 1903, SUN BAOXUAN—A SCHOLAR-OFFICIAL IN LATE QING DYNASTY CHINA—documented in his diary that he had acquired a copy of the periodical 新小說(Xin xiaoshuo;“he New Novel”), founded by Liang Qichao in 1902 to propagate translated fiction and new Chinese fiction. Immediately drawn to the stories and novels it carried, Sun soon concluded that Western fiction had the unique strength of imparting knowledge and expanding rational capacity: 「觀西人政治 小說，可以悟政治原理；觀科學小說，可以通種種格物原理；觀包 探小說，可以覘西國人情土俗及其居心之險詐詭變，有非我國所 能及者」 (“Political novels teach us principles of politics; scientific novels teach us theories of things; detective novels show us Western customs and treachery, which often surpass ours”; 690). Immersed in a culture where vernacular novels had been suppressed by official censorship and prejudice among the elites, Sun ardently embraced translated fiction. By contrast, vernacular Chinese novels, with few exceptions, seemed to him routinely 「陳腐」 (“decadent”), providing no more than 「排遣」 (“diversion and entertainment”; 677, 690) The perceived rationality of Western fiction gave him a sudden license to seriously engage with a genre that the literary culture in China continued to exclude well into the twentieth century. Sun's encounter with foreign fiction marked the early stage of a somewhat bumpy adventure. In later sections of the diary, Sun documents reading sentimental strains of translated fiction and the more ambiguous responses they incited in him.

Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River by Max McCoy

Reviewed by: Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River by Max McCoy Michael Farrell Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River. By Max McCoy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. ix + 306 pp. Illustrations. $27.95 cloth. At the book's outset it looks like Max McCoy is going to take us on a fairly predictable trip down the Arkansas via kayak, or by jeep or on foot where he can't float, and tell us the natural history of this major river that rises in the Rockies and eventually joins the Missouri after crossing the plains of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and on into Arkansas. Very soon it becomes apparent that is not, broadly speaking, where we're headed. McCoy uses the natural eastward flow of the Arkansas River as the prime organizing principle for his narrative, but we soon begin to realize that, just like biographies of complex individuals, the life story of this river contains a mix of tragedy, heroism, humor, and, in McCoy's case, the opportunity to confront and wrestle with personal demons and failings. Max McCoy is a writing and journalism associate professor at Emporia State University in Kansas. He was raised near the Oklahoma border in Baxter Springs on a tributary of the Arkansas and recounts early formative experiences fishing with his dad on area streams that led to his fascination with watersheds. Born in 1958, he's spent a career in journalism, with stints in near-by Missouri and overseas in Japan. He's best known for his western fiction work and for his reporting on hate groups and serial killers. So this work is a departure for him. Perhaps his motivations for taking up the challenge to traverse a watershed from top to bottom are in response to the fact that he is now entering his seventh decade, and the road ahead is shrinking as the rear view expands. There is nothing like a harsh physical challenge to make you feel alive, if you survive it. Because McCoy views the world through his hard-edged journalist's eyes, he tends to seek out and highlight stories that end in tragedy or are tinged with the scent of human failings. If we can think of a river as a person with an infinite set of stories, then McCoy sees this river's personhood through his own filters, emphasizing aspects of its history and bringing to the fore both historic and contemporary events that strike him as pertinent, telling, and reflective of our common social reality in the age of Trump (whom he reviles). We learn of kayak drownings, the ill-fated Pike Expedition of 1806, the Sand Creek Massacre, Dodge City's Boot Hill, where lonesome cowboys and soiled doves are buried, the recent plot by white nationalists to blow up a Somali convenience store, and the region's earthquakes that are now commonplace due to the underground disposal of the residue waters caused by fracking— and a few unsavory shoreline encounters with guntoting yahoos thrown in. McCoy is a gifted storyteller, and his take on his subjects veers away from the tendency of journalists to [End Page 47] maintain some bogus sense of "objectivity." We know who he is and where he stands in relation to his subjects. And the Arkansas, like the author, is full of interesting stories made more compelling for the scars. Michael Farrell Platte Basin Timelapse University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Strange Career of Ulysses S. Grant

The Strange Career of Ulysses S. Grant Owen Wister (bio) OWEN WISTER (1860–1938) is now best known as the author of The Virginian, a novel published in 1902 and one of the founding documents in the enduring and endlessly evolving conception of the American frontier in general and the western hero in particular. The grandson of Fanny Kemble, one of the most celebrated actresses of the nineteenth century, he was born in Philadelphia, educated in boarding schools in Europe and the United States, and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1882. His early ambitions centered on music (Franz Liszt heard him play and confirmed his achievements), but he returned to Philadelphia to undertake a career in business at the same time as he pursued a series of writing projects. The strain produced by these conflicting imperatives likely resulted in a nervous breakdown, and in 1885 he traveled to Wyoming—the first of many such trips to that region—in hopes of restoring his health. After securing a degree from the Harvard Law School, he committed himself to a life as a writer of western fiction, publishing a sequence of stories and novels on this theme over the decade from 1891 to 1902. Two years before the appearance of The Virginian, an enormously successful book that would continue to hold the attention of readers for generations, Wister published a brief biography of Ulysses S. Grant in the series of Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans edited by Mark De Wolfe Howe. In later years there were some comparable works: The Seven Ages of Washington came out in 1907 and Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, which traced his association with Theodore Roosevelt back to their years together at Harvard, appeared in 1930. Over the course of the last three decades of his life, Wister's work moved in different directions—he brought out a novel of social manners, Lady Baltimore (1906), reminiscent of Henry James, who was a friend of his mother's, as well as a variety of political writings; but he was drawn again and again to the western, which— however uneasy he might have been about the literary confinement associated with that genre—seemed to offer him a necessary imaginative home. As for General and later President Ulysses S. Grant, his complex career, alternating between personal failure and public success, has continued to haunt the minds of readers and writers ever since the publication of his Memoirs, one of the greatest works of American autobiography ever written. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is only one of the works that reflects its deep and lasting impact and the vexing nature of Grant's ambiguous example. This excerpt from Owen Wister's short life of Grant is taken from his Ulysses S. Grant in the Beacon series, published in 1900 by Small, Maynard & Company in Boston. —SD [End Page 197] None of our public men have a story so strange as this. It is stranger than Lincoln's. It is very much the strangest of them all. ________ Is it accident that at the beginning of a certain four years this middle-aged man should be nobody, and at the end should be the one commander out of all to win and retain the supreme confidence of his government and his people? It has been called accident by some grown-up writers. His own words give the unconscious explanation: "I feel as sure of taking Richmond as I do of dying." Not McClellan, not Meade, not Lincoln himself, not any one at all, had ever been able to feel as sure as that. This utter certainty of the Union's success burned in Grant like a central fire, and, with all his limitations, made his will a great natural force which gravitated simply and irresistibly to its end. Lincoln, beginning to feel it from afar, answered the grave complaints that rose after the carnage of Shiloh: "I can't spare this man: he fights." And presently, during the impatient days of Vicksburg failures, he insists: "I rather like the man. I think we'll try him a little longer." Finally comes the renowned remark...

Formulating Western Fiction in Garrett Touch of Texas

Formulating Western Fiction in Garrett Touch of Texas

Formulating Western Fiction in Garrett <i>Touch of Texas</i>

Western fiction as one of the popular novels has some common conventions such as the setting of life in frontier filled with natural ferocity and uncivilized people. This type of fiction also has a hero who is usually a ranger or cowboy. This study aims to find a Western fiction formula and look for new things that may appear in the novel Touch of Texas as a Western novel. Taking the original convention of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, this study also looks for the invention and convention of Touch of Texas by using Cawelti’s formula theory. The study finds that Garrett's Touch of Texas not only features a natural malignancy against civilization, a ranger as a single hero, and a love story, but also shows an element of revenge and the other side of a neglected minority life. A hero or ranger in this story comes from a minority group, a mixture of white blood and Indians. The romance story also shows a different side. The woman in the novel is not the only one to be saved, but a Ranger is too, especially from the wounds and ridicule of the population as a ranger of mixed blood. The story ends with a romantic tale between Jake and Rachel. Further research can be done to find the development of western genre with other genres such as detective and mystery.

Ernest Haycox and the Western by Richard W. Etulain

Reviewed by: Ernest Haycox and the Western by Richard W. Etulain Daniel Worden Richard W. Etulain, Ernest Haycox and the Western. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2017. 200 pp. Cloth, $29.95. A productive author of Western fiction, Ernest Haycox wrote twenty-four novels and over two hundred short stories. Most notably for scholars of Western American literature and film today, Haycox's 1937 story "Stage to Lordsburg" was adapted into John Ford's landmark 1939 film Stagecoach. In his engaging biographical study, Richard W. Etulain chronicles Haycox's career as a Western writer, from his prolific work for pulp magazines to his later interest in breaking out of the Western formula he helped to define. In so doing, Etulain offers not only a valuable study of Haycox and his [End Page 261] work but also a model for how neglected Western writers can be approached as both literary figures and laborers within a publishing industry that thrived on the Western genre. Etulain's book begins with a brief account of the Western genre's emergence, from frontier narratives and Cooper's Leatherstocking saga to the Western genre's solidification into "something of a morality play" by the first decades of the twentieth century (18). This sets the scene for Haycox's entrance into literary culture in the 1920s, when he devotes himself to "learning and practicing the formula of the Western" that had become ubiquitous in pulp and middlebrow magazines (19). After establishing the literary context Haycox would encounter as an adult, Etulain then tells Haycox's life story, from his birth in Portland, Oregon, to a family that struggled financially and moved around a great deal, to high school, and to service overseas during World War I. Attending college first at Reed, then at the University of Oregon, Haycox wrote for campus newspapers, and in so doing, Etulain notes, Haycox would begin to articulate his worldview: "He held that one should be independent in beliefs and actions but not to such an extent as to isolate one's self from society" (34). This perspective has a clear affinity with the Western genre, in which isolated individual Westerners are often compelled to act heroically, in the interests of a larger good. In a brief foray into Haycox's politics, Etulain also remarks that Haycox's worldview would reach beyond his fiction writing and "helps explain why Haycox stood against Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and became a strong advocate of conservative Republicanism in the 1930s and 1940s" (34). This is a rare gesture in the book to the broader social and political currents that surrounded Haycox and the Western in the twentieth century. The book's major focus is on the development of Haycox's literary career, from his short stories and serialized novels in pulp magazines such as Western Story Magazine, his later publications in the more prestigious and better paying Collier's, and his novels. Etulain details Haycox's vision of writing, which differs from more romantic conceptions of the profession, noting that "Haycox considered himself more of a craftsman than an artist. He was convinced that writing could be compared with plumbing, [End Page 262] carpentering, or any other such skill" (71). Gradually, Haycox began to depart from the Western genre formulas he honed in the pulps, perhaps most notably in his 1944 historical novel about the Battle of Little Big Horn, Bugles in the Afternoon. He would continue this focus on history, instead of formula, with the posthumously published The Earthbreakers in 1952. In this novel, Etulain sees evidence of a broader conception of novelistic form, a more complex representation of character, and a nuanced engagement with history. Unfortunately, Haycox would not complete the trilogy that The Earthbreakers was supposed to begin. Ernest Haycox and the Western portrays the life of a working Western writer, devoted to craft and the market yet not without literary ambitions. In the book's epilogue, Etulain reflects on Haycox's place, or lack thereof, in the canon of Western American literature and whether we should think of Haycox among genre writers like Max Brand, Zane Grey, and Louis L'Amour or among more "literary" figures such as Walter...

William Beckford’s Comic Book, or Visualizing Orientalism with Vathek

Since its publication in 1786, William Beckford’s oriental tale Vathek has polarized readers. Written in the style of The Arabian Nights, Beckford’s novella of the ninth caliph of Baghdad has been paradoxically defined as Eastern fable, Western fiction, autobiography, biography, and proto-ethnography. Likewise, stylistic assessments have cast Beckford’s tale as satire, parody, pastiche, gothic, horror, and camp. This article attributes Vathek’s striking polysemy to its visualizing orientalism, a graphic—and graphical—manner of depiction not unlike the visual-textual language of comics. With its emphasis on setting, action, and gesture, Vathek reads like a classic action-adventure comic book. Moreover, Beckford’s penchant for exaggeration and distortion steers Vathek into the domain of caricature and cartooning, an aesthetic that dominated the most popular European action-adventure comics, or bandes dessinées, of the mid-twentieth century. Drawing heavily on comics theory, this anachronistic and experimental re-evaluation of Vathek as a comic book uncovers the mechanics of Beckford’s visualizing orientalism and gauges the effects of caricature and cartoons on its resonance and reception.