Weird Westerns

Kerry Fine is an instructor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Michael K. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Maine–Farmington. Rebecca M. Lush is an associate professor at California State University, San Marcos. Sara L. Spurgeon is a professor of American literature at Texas Tech University.

• Introduction: Westworld(s): Race, Gender, Genre in the Weird WesternMichael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. SpurgeonPart 1. The Weird West, Past and Present1. Attack of the Monstrous Vegetable: Bret Harte’s Pioneer Nightmare and “Miscegenation” DreamTara Penry2. Strange Country: Sexuality and the Feminine in Robert Coover’s Ghost TownEric Meljac and Alex Hunt3. A Selective History: Identity and Identification in DeadlandsNicholas William MollPart 2. Native Reclamations and Representations4. Mongrel Transmotion: The Werewolf and the Were/Wear/Where-West in Stephen Graham Jones’s MongrelsJoshua T. Anderson5. Indianizing the Western: Semiotic Tricksterism in William Sanders’s Journey to Fusang 000Sara L. Spurgeon6. Magnificence and Metas in Professional WesternsDomino Renee PerezPart 3. Surrogate indians and Other Indigenous Metaphors7. Defamiliarizing the Western on the Extraterrestrial Frontier: Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in LandscapeJohannes Fehrle8. Shining the Light of Civilization: The Savage Other of the Frontier in Firefly and Serenity 000Meredith Harvey9. Racial Metaphors and Vanishing indians in Wynonna Earp, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Emma Bull’s TerritoryRebecca M. LushPart 4. The African American Presence in the Weird Western10. The Mad Black Woman in Stephen King’s The Dark TowerJacob Burg11. Uncle Tom’s Cabin Showdown: Stowe, Tarantino, and the Minstrelsy of the Weird West 000Joshua D. Smith12. Race and Gender in the Time Travel WesternMichael K. JohnsonPart 5. The Undead in the Weird Western13. Go West, Old Man: Or, Buffalo Bill and the “Yellow Peril” in Zeppelins WestCynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper14. amc’s The Walking Dead and the Restructuring of Gender and Race on the Neofrontier000 Scott Pearce15. Afterword: This Is (Not) the EndStephen Graham JonesContributorsIndex

"The rich essay anthology Weird Westerns (2020) tracks the eldritch undeath of the western across the primordially bleak cultural landscape of today, convincingly making the case that what was once a niche subgenre of horror-infused supernatural or fantastic western stories now spreads its insidious tendrils far and wide in contemporary popular media and literature."-Jerome Winter, Science Fiction Film and Television "Weird Westerns will no doubt enrich courses on literatures of the American West, speculative fiction, film and television, and genre studies."-Travis Franks, Western American Literature “Weird Westerns is a contemplative and compelling foray into the colorful and broad ideological vistas of the western. This compendium of smart, theoretically diverse, and intellectually insurgent essays engages the fantasy construction of the American frontier across multiple mediums of popular consumption and reads as an open-ended challenge to (re)situate and (re)imagine the western regarding race and gender.”-Adilifu Nama, author of Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes, winner of the American Book Award This tantalizing collection addresses a wide variety of print, television, and film westerns that incorporate steampunk, zombies, time travel, alternate history, science fiction, and many more influences. Weird Westerns proves that the western continues to be a relevant genre in American popular culture.”-Victoria Lamont, author of Westerns: A Women’s History “This comprehensive and fascinating journey through the unique landscape of the weird west analyzes texts from a fresh perspective that resonate with social issues of the present day. From Native American and African American representation to sexual and racial identity, this book will inspire further research and discussion.”-Paul Green, author of Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns “This wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection stretches the genre boundaries of the western into the speculative and the weird and in so doing enables us to think differently and better-uncannily-about its deep history and its often unquestioned ideological assumptions.”-Neil Campbell, author of The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age “Weird Westerns is brave, original, and timely. The editors have compiled an assortment of rich, insightful, and daring scholarship that applies multiple theoretical approaches to the shifting landscapes of the (weird) western.”-Monica Montelongo Flores, assistant professor of English at California State University, Stanislaus “This exciting volume showed me how ‘weird’ the complex western genre has always been: thankfully never living up to what so many pretend it is. With essays by established scholars and illuminating newcomers to the field, we see how the western has always played, indeed depended, upon questions of race and gender to make sense of itself and of the cultures we live in. It will be a go-to book in the thriving field of western U.S. literary and cultural studies.”-William R. Handley, coeditor of True West: Authenticity and the American West