ABSTRACT
Lukács, whose major work included a study of the historical novel (Lukács, 1962), might have had the cinema’s major counterpart of historical fiction, the western film, in mind. Often dismissed, in the famous ‘slanguage’ of the film trade paper Variety, as ‘oaters’ – because of the omnipresence of oat-eating horses – the Western, in part because of its permanent witness to American life and its simple, persistent generic forms, was often a powerful vehicle for articulating the ‘great alternatives’ contemplated by Lukács.
