Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
Summary
As a consequence of decades of revisionist histories of the American West, the traditional frontier themes of the ‘domestication of the wilderness’ and ‘Manifest Destiny’ have been largely discredited. Many analyses of the politics of westward expansion have interpreted the process of ‘nation-building’ as nothing short of imperialism motivated by economic forces; imperialism that often resulted in wars of extermination against America's indigenous populations. The established history of the American West was addressed in the light of the narratives that became available as hitherto ‘silent’ groups – women, African Americans, Native Americans and other racial groupings – insisted that their presence ‘on the frontier’ be acknowledged and their voices heard. In short, the established history came to be seen as not so much biased as wholly mythic. The source of this mythology was a political discourse informed by notions of Anglo-American racial superiority and American exceptionalism. Together with a popular culture that demanded an heroic version of history, such ‘frontier narratives’ flourished first in the dime novels and stage shows of the late nineteenth century. But the principal medium whereby frontier mythology was popularised in the twentieth century was, of course, the cinema. And just as the grand narrative of the frontier had splintered under the weight of historical revisionism, so too was the cinematic Western understood to be anachronistic, leading to the common appellation ‘post’, as in ‘post-Western’.
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- Myth of the WesternNew Perspectives on Hollywood's Frontier Narrative, pp. 1 - 26Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014