The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West

Steven Frye is Professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield. He is President of the Cormac McCarthy Society, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, and author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy and Understanding Larry McMurtry.

• 1. Introduction Steven Frye; 2. Transnational Wests: the literature of Spanish exploration M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo; 3. Western folk traditions: from colonization to Mark Twain and the San Francisco Circle John Dudley; 4. Settlement, promise, and catastrophe in the middle regions Daniel Worden; 5. Gender and the literature of expansion Cathryn Halverson; 6. The American West and the literature of environmental consciousness Susan Kollin; 7. California in late settlement Pierre Lagayette; 8. The West in modern verse Gioia Woods; 9. Noir fiction and the Western city Lee Clark Mitchell; 10. The Western and film Stacey Peebles; 11. The Native American Renaissance Nicholas Monk; 12. Chicana/o literature in the West Rafael Perez-Torres; 13. Mestiza consciousness of La Frontera/Borderlands in Sandra Cisneros and Helena Maria Viramontes Linda Rader Overman; 14. The West and the Asian American experience Marguerite Nguyen; 15. African-American literature and the early West Eric Gardner; 16. Wallace Stegner and the literature of historical memory Robert Thacker; 17. Cormac McCarthy: narratives and borders Steven Frye.

'The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West offers precisely what the Companions are meant to offer - a rich compendium of contextual, historical, and thematic approaches to literatures under discussion, in this case, literatures of the American West. This book, a straightforward, usable, and accessible volume, will be indispensable for undergraduate, graduate, and emerging scholars on the topic, and advanced scholars will find the pleasures of concise and thoughtful overviews here as well.' Lydia R. Cooper, Cercles