ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 explores the foundational genre of the Western. It begins with a historical overview of cultural influences that helped shape the Western, including dime novels and wild west shows, and then moves on to discuss the development and popularity of the genre during the early days of cinema. An overview of studio-era Westerns concludes with a look at the revisionist Western during the social unrest of the 1960s. A section on “Critical Issues” begins by exploring the genre in terms of myth and the concept of structuralism. There follows a discussion of the genre's problematic ideology in terms of colonialism and racial representation, as well as its traditional masculine emphasis. The case study of Maggie Greenwald's The Ballad of Little Jo (1993) demonstrates how the film challenges the genre's conventional masculinist ideology in both form and content.
