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.)

Ben Bridges top 50 westerns

The Ostern

I'm 14 months into my study of the western genre. Just when I think I've got a handle on it all a new type of western makes itself known to me, The Ostern ("the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries' take on the Western").

Does anyone know anything about these films? Was there a written equivalent in those countries?

Favorite western short stories

Read a lot of great westerns over the last year and had some great conversations here about the genre. New question.

What are your favorite short story westerns?

A couple that I really like:

Miley Bennett by Jack Schaefer

Stage to Lordsburg by Ernest Haycox

Lost Sister by Dorothy M Johnson

The opening section of Hard Rain Falling

"...the traditional western has sexism built in because the woman symbolizes an alternative to violence: she offers the hero a way out without killing, but to satisfy the need for action, this offer must be rejected, making the woman’s role a rather tiresome impediment to the main attraction. "

Interesting. I don't necessarily like the "neo" term but agree with the sentiment. The Western genre, in many respects, literally died. And that has to be taken into account when writing in and about the genre:

"Leonard’s novel was written just at the end of what we now remember as the golden age of the Western genre, at a time when the author himself had already migrated to more fresh and vibrant varieties of potboiler. Since then, time has passed, John Wayne has died, and the image of a ranch-dwelling man on horseback has been requisitioned by a series of decreasingly plausible American presidents. Yet the Western itself has never quite gone extinct. It lives on in the form of the neo-Western, the backward-looking descendant of the original species, distinguished above all by its self-awareness as a genre out of time. That is to say, the neo-Western knows that the Western is a dead genre, and it knows that we know it, too. And so it must somehow attempt to answer (implicitly or explicitly, through serious reflection or through mocking parody) the question of how this came to be."

Classism and the western

Section from an article from the mid 80s frames the Western in class terms:

"Like other literary genres, the western continues to evoke criticism and debate. ''It has always been split between two extremes,'' said Don Graham, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas, and an authority on western writing. ''There's the bus station western, the paperback original, that's mostly a lower-middle-class literary form -the tradition of Zane Grey, of which Louis L'Amour is the chief practitioner today. Then there's western American literature, by writers like McMurtry, William Eastlake, Wallace Stegner. What's interesting is that both forms seem to be enjoying a resurgence.''