1
/
of
1
Oxford University Press, USA
Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924
Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924
Regular price
$47.95 USD
Regular price
Sale price
$47.95 USD
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Quantity
Couldn't load pickup availability
From Hollywood films to novels by Louis L'Amour and television series like Gunsmoke and Deadwood, the Wild West has exerted a powerful hold on the cultural imagination of the United States. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt's founding of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, Christine Bold
traces the origins and evolution of the western genre, revealing how a group of prominent eastern aristocrats-a cadre she terms the frontier club -created and propagated the myth of the Wild West to advance their own self-interest as well as larger systems of privilege and exclusion. Mining institutional archives, personal papers, novels, and films, The Frontier Club excavates the hidden social, political, and financial interests behind the making of the modern western. It re-reads frontier-club fiction, most notably Owen Wister's bestseller The Virginian, in relation to federal
policies and cultural spaces (from exclusive gentlemen's clubs to national parks to zoos); it casts new light on key clubmen, both the famous and the forgotten-figures such as Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Silas Weir Mitchell, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Frederic Remington-while recovering the women
on whom these men depended and without whom this version of the popular West would not exist; and it considers the costs of the frontier-club formula, in terms of its impact on Indigenous peoples and its marginalization of other popular voices, including western writings by African Americans, women,
and working-class white men. An engaging cultural history that covers print culture, big-game hunting, politics, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, and environmental conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, The Frontier Club provides a welcome new perspective on the enduring American myth of the Wild West.
Author: Christine Bold
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 01/31/2013
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780199731794
Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2013
traces the origins and evolution of the western genre, revealing how a group of prominent eastern aristocrats-a cadre she terms the frontier club -created and propagated the myth of the Wild West to advance their own self-interest as well as larger systems of privilege and exclusion. Mining institutional archives, personal papers, novels, and films, The Frontier Club excavates the hidden social, political, and financial interests behind the making of the modern western. It re-reads frontier-club fiction, most notably Owen Wister's bestseller The Virginian, in relation to federal
policies and cultural spaces (from exclusive gentlemen's clubs to national parks to zoos); it casts new light on key clubmen, both the famous and the forgotten-figures such as Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Silas Weir Mitchell, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Frederic Remington-while recovering the women
on whom these men depended and without whom this version of the popular West would not exist; and it considers the costs of the frontier-club formula, in terms of its impact on Indigenous peoples and its marginalization of other popular voices, including western writings by African Americans, women,
and working-class white men. An engaging cultural history that covers print culture, big-game hunting, politics, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, and environmental conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, The Frontier Club provides a welcome new perspective on the enduring American myth of the Wild West.
Author: Christine Bold
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 01/31/2013
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780199731794
Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2013
About the Author
Christine Bold is Professor of English at the University of Guelph. Her previous books include U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920; Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960; Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists: The WPA Writers' Project in Massachusetts; and The WPA Guides: Mapping America.
This title is not returnable
Share
