Worlding the Western: Contemporary Us Western Fiction and the Global Community

Worlding the Western views the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a reexamination of the consequences of the exceptionalism and closed borders of the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to challenge the dark side of globalization. He proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics.

Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction considered in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case in which these features are present and yet, historically, have often been masked or denied in the rush toward unanimity and nation building. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to view the notion of a single world under pressure.


Author: Neil Campbell
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Published: 09/13/2022
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.91w x 0.71d
ISBN13: 9781647790554
ISBN10: 1647790557
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | American | General

About the Author
Neil Campbell is professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom. He has published widely on the American West in articles, book chapters, and monographs. Campbell is also the author of an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the postwar American West, Cultures of the American New West, The Rhizomatic West, and Post-Westerns. He is co-editor of the book series Place, Memory, Affect, which contains a volume he wrote, Affective Critical Regionality, and he is the editor of Under the Western Sky: Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin.