Postwestern Cultures

Postwestern Cultures synthesizes the most critical topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West within a single volume. This interdisciplinary anthology features leading scholars in the varied fields of western American literary studies and includes new regional studies, global studies, studies of popular culture, environmental criticism, gender and queer theory, and multiculturalism. Postwestern Cultures, like all successful studies of western American literature, is necessarily diverse and wide-ranging; it grasps the multifaceted quality of the landscape, literature, and critical analysis by engaging postmodern theory, spatial theory, cultural studies, and transnational and transcultural understandings of the local. This collection emphasizes the importance of understanding the region not as a confined or static space but as a constantly changing entity in both substance and form. It examines subjects ranging from the use of frontier rhetoric in Japanese American internment camp narratives to the emergence of agricultural tourism in the New West to the application of geographer J. B. Jackson's theories to abandoned western landscapes.Susan Kollin is an associate professor of English at Montana State University and the author of Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier. Contributors: Michael Beehler, Neil Campbell, Krista Comer, Nancy Cook, Audrey Goodman, Melody Graulich, Susan Kollin, Beth Loffreda, Lee Clark Mitchell, Capper Nichols, David Oates, John Streamas, and Stephen Tatum.