The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western

This text employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions - political, racial, sexual, social and religious - which have beset modern America from "Stagecoach" and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. The book focuses on a group of great Westerns, showing how they engaged covertly with such issues as miscegenation, labour-management relations, generational discord, codes of masculinity, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, increasing individual social alienation, and explains why a celebratory genre veered, during a generation of unprecedented power and prosperity, from sagas of national achievement to bleak, virtually asocial visions of life in the United States.

Author: Michael Coyne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 08/21/1998
Pages: 260
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.17w x 0.75d
ISBN13: 9781860642593
ISBN10: 1860642594
BISAC Categories:
- Performing Arts | Film | History & Criticism

About the Author
Michael Coyne is a writer and film historian. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.