ABSTRACT
For nearly two centuries, Americans have embraced the Western like no other artistic genre. Creators and consumers alike have utilized this story form in literature, painting, film, radio, and television to explore questions of national identity and purpose dating back to frontier narratives from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Indian captivity stories and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. The Jews and Greeks created their national mythologies out of the raw materials of their respective histories, and so too have Americans in all of the many artistic and mediated expressions of the Western. Overall, this collection draws upon the Journal of Popular Film & Television’s rich and longstanding legacy of scholarship on this important genre in order to examine and analyze the evolution and significance of the screen Western from its earliest beginnings to its global reach and relevance in the twenty-first century.
