Description
Looking across the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, its literature, film, television, comic books, and other media, we can see multiple examples of what Shelley S. Rees calls a "changeling western," what others have called "weird westerns," and what Michael K. Johnson refers to as "speculative westerns"--that is, hybrid western forms created by merging the western with one or more speculative genres or subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history.
Speculative Wests investigates both speculative westerns and other speculative texts that feature western settings. Just as "western" refers both to a genre and a region, Johnson's narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the "speculative Wests" that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Ireland's Deathless Divide (2020), the reimagined future Navajo nation of Rebecca Roanhorse's Sixth World series (2018-19), and the complex temporal and geographic borderlands of Alfredo Véa's time travel novel The Mexican Flyboy (2016). Focusing on literature, film, and television from 2016 to 2020, Speculative Wests creates new visions of the American West.
Michael K. Johnson is a professor of American literature at the University of Maine-Farmington. He is the author of several books, including Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West, Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature, and A Black Woman's West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon.
Author: Michael K. Johnson
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 03/01/2023
Pages: 286
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.64d
ISBN13: 9781496234582
ISBN10: 1496234588
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | American | General
- Literary Criticism | Science Fiction & Fantasy
About the Author
Michael K. Johnson is a professor of American literature at the University of Maine-Farmington. He is the author of several books, including Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West, Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature, and A Black Woman's West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon.