The crowded prairie : American national identity in the Hollywood western / Micheal Coyne.

Περιλαμβάνει βιβλιογραφία (σ. 220-233) και ευρετήριο.

Mirror for Prewar America: Stagecoach and the Western, 1939-1941 -- Puritan Paradigms: My Darling Clementine and Duel in the Sun -- "The Lonely Crowd", Catholicism and Consensus on the Prairie: Red River, Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon -- Dysfunctional Family Structures in Classic Westerns, 1950-1961: The Gunfighter, Shane, The Searchers and The Last Sunset -- Politics and Codes of Masculinity in Late 1950s Star Westerns: The Big Country and Warlock -- "No More West to Win": How the West Was Won and the Elegiac Westerns of 1962 -- A Genre in Flux, A Nation in Turmoil: The Vietnamization of the Western in Mid-1960s America.

The Crowded Prairie examines the interaction of the Hollywood Western with diverse strands of US society, culture and ideology from the end of the Depression to the Bicentennial in 1976. In these years the Western became a vital medium for exploring many tensions which beset modern America, engaging covertly with such thorny issues as intervention in World War II, miscegenation, generational discord, ethnic ascendancy, McCarthyism, Civil Rights, Vietnam, Watergate and, above all, the individual's ever-increasing alienation from the changing values of American society. With force and fluency, Michael Coyne focuses on a group of Westerns chosen according to commercial success and critical acclaim, charting the Western's thematic transition from an agenda of patriotism and community involvement to fundamental distrust of America's power structure and personal disaffection.