Books : Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women's Writing (Cultural Studies of the United States)
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by: Krista Comer
Amazon.com's Price: $23.95 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 810.93278082
EAN: 9780807848135
ISBN: 0807848131
Label: The University of North Carolina Press
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 312
Publication Date: June 28, 1999
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Release Date: June 09, 1999
Sales Rank: 1487511
Studio: The University of North Carolina Press
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Product Description:
In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women's movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers.
Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and antimodern, have been slow to reckon with the emergence of a new, far more 'feminine,' postmodern, multiracial, and urban west. Here, she calls for a redesign of the field of western cultural studies, one that engages issues of gender and race and is more self-conscious about space itself—especially that cherished symbol of western 'authenticity,' open landscape. Surveying works by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Clearman Blew, Comer shows how these and other contemporary women writers have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - A great challenge to traditional views of women & the West
Beautifully written and wonderfully detailed, this book looks at literature by women who, in different ways, make "the West" their home. But Comer overturns defintions of the West as simply the old frontier and "the big sky." The West is black women in LA and Asian women in San Fransisco and Native Indian women writing about their modern lives. The book has very interesting interpretations of contempory women's literature, but the best part is the way it makes you re-think what you thought ... Read More
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