The Rise of the New Western in the 1960s: E.L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times

On the New Western:

In these circumstances, the Western managed to survive by parodying its own formula restrictions and distorting the classic reader’s expectations of the genre. The Western also became part and parcel of the artistic innovations at hand as it was taken up even by traditionally non-Western writers such as Thomas Berger (Little Big Man, 1964), Ishmael Reed (Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, 1968) and E.L. Doctorow, to name a few. These authors turned to the most popular genre of the time with a double mission: to both deconstruct it, and to use it to revive the traditional novel-writing process through the use of Western elements. The traditional novel, like the Western, was commonly regarded to have exhausted itself.

Edge books as revisionist westerns?

I've read a couple of the later Edge series western books over the years and I'm thinking about reading some of the earlier ones. This post suggests some revisionist characteristics in the Edge series. Having not read enough of them yet, this doesn't feel like the best comparison, but as I read more of them I'll keep an open mind to the possibility. I'm intrigued to look at the books through that lens. The post also attempts to draw some broad parallels between the western genre and the fantasy genre.

Edge is billed as a "new kind of Western hero" - a self-consciously revisionist approach to the John Ford / Zane Grey tradition.

"As codified by Texas literary giants like Walter Prescott Webb and T. R. Fehrenbach, our quasi-religious history has often resembled historical fiction—a triumphalist mythology that a generation of “revisionist” (i.e., factual) historians has largely failed to budge from our collective psyche. Instead, ironically, the task of debunking all those popular misconceptions has fallen to contemporary Western novelists. Historical revisionism, it seems, wears better in cowboy boots; over the past three decades, the nihilistic anti-heroism of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) has evolved into Meyer’s more complex but no less morally desolate frontier, where everyone is either a victim or a thief. While the new offerings by Wittliff, McMurtry, and Guinn are considerably less apocalyptic in tone than McCarthy’s and Meyer’s books, they similarly challenge old-school readers with timely meditations on racism, sexism, and even economic inequality. "

Genre and the geographies of violence: Cormac McCarthy and the contemporary western.

Really interesting paper from Susan Kollin



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If we take seriously Robinson's observations about the self-subversion of traditional Westerns, the ways even classic Westerns contain elements that overturn their dominant themes, then the generic distinctions defining Western texts as traditional or revisionist ultimately fail us, as the concept of a purely faithful or fully critical text loses its explanatory power.(FN2) If classic Westerns contain moments of resistance and self-reflection, carrying with them their own critique, to what extent might anti-Westerns preserve moments of desire, moments of connection and identification with elements of the classic Western? Perhaps the genre might better be understood as a continuum, its critique operating along a spectrum. On the one end may be found the classic Western, which upholds--with varying degrees of success--the codes and conventions of the form, its Anglo male protagonist, and the national project, but which contains resistant elements that undermine its cultural logic and status as a discrete, coherent entity. On the other end may be found the anti-Western, itself an unstable and shifting form that engages in a critical dialogue with the genre but that is also shaped by a certain desire for and attraction to the classic features of the Western. By understanding the Western as a genre structured by competing and contradictory impulses, audiences may make better sense of McCarthy's--and by extension McMurtry's--shifting treatment of the form.

Haints Stay and some thoughts on revisionist westerns

[I wrote a little something on revisionist western novels. I'm not an expert, only an aficionado, and I'm still thinking on the subject so this may be a little rough and evolving. But it was something I wanted to write.]

this piece originally appeared at Spinetingler on August 3, 2016

Haints Stay seems to occupy a space where the prime influence is Blood Meridian. I want to talk a little about that space.

When Cormac McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian he approached the western from an honest place, meaning he genuinely liked the genre and Blood Meridian came from a long gestation of consuming the genre. Blood Meridian is a very popular book and it’s influence cannot be overstated. This is, potentially, a problem because subsequent writers carry Blood Meridian as a primary influence without all of the ground work that influenced McCarthy’s writing of it. Kind of like a history book that cites only secondary influences.

Revisionist westerns

My current project is working on and grappling with, a history and working definition of revisionist western novels. I just finished reading Welcome to Hard Times by E. L. Doctorow (holy shit what a great book).

To understand revisionist westerns you also have to understand traditional westerns. So I wanted my next read to be traditional. I wanted to read a Luke Short and remembered that Heath Lowrance had written about him in the past. So I settled on Fiddlefoot.

(And if anyone has any ideas on what to do with a finalized, longer piece on revisionist westerns let me know.)