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Women in the Western
Edited by Sue Matheson
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Book Presentation:
Explores the changing roles of women to the Western and offers new approaches to what has been a male-centred genre
• Pioneers new avenues for research on the Western and includes a bibliography of the extant criticism on women and Western to encourage further scholarship
• Charts significant shifts in Hollywood’s transmission of American gender values and expectations
• Examines the common Western tropes of women homesteaders, soiled doves, masculinised and erotically dangerous women and female characters bent on revenge
• Traditional and intertextual representations of women in the Western are considered
As the Western matured, women’s roles became more complex and modern – transmitting a subtle cultural coding about the nature of westward expansionism, heroism, family life, manliness and American femininity. In Women in the Western, a range of international scholars explores the changing roles of women in the genre through case studies of classic films like Broken Arrow (1950) and The Searchers (1956), and contemporary films and TV series like Wind River (2017) and Justified (2010–15). Considering traditional and intertextual representations of women in the Western, the book charts the significant shifts in Hollywood’s transmission of gender values and expectations.
About the Author:
Sue Matheson is Full Professor of English at the University College of the North in Manitoba, Canada. Her interests in film, culture, and literature may be found in more than sixty articles published in a wide range of books and scholarly journals. She is the editor of Love in Western Film and Television: Happy Hearts and Lonely Trails, A Fistful of Icons: Essays on Frontier Fixtures of the American Western, Women in the Western and The Good, the Bad and the Ancient: Essays on the Greco-Roman Influence in Westerns. She is the author of The Westerns and War Films of John Ford and The John Ford Encyclopedia.
Press Reviews:
In 1992 Jane Tompkins in West Of Everything raised the disturbing question of why there had not been a focus on women in the Western genre when they were obviously such key characters. Thankfully, Women In The Western, with its eighteen articles, selected filmography and two selected bibliographies about film and television Westerns provides the first sustained, scholarly answer to that important question almost thirty years later.– Professor Michael Marsden, St Norbert College
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> From the same author:
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Subject: Director > Mel Brooks
The Good, the Bad and the Ancient (2022)
Essays on the Greco-Roman Influence in Westerns
Dir. Sue Matheson
> On a related topic:
Westerns Women (2004)
Interviews with 50 Leading Ladies of Movie and Television Westerns from the 1930s to the 1960s
by Boyd Magers and Michael G. Fitzgerald
Hell-Bent for Leather (2025)
Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western
by Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush and Sara L. Spurgeon
French Westerns (2024)
On the Frontier of Film Genre and French Cinema
Twisting in Air (2024)
The Sensational Rise of a Hollywood Falling Horse
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