Examines an eclectic group of western women’s autobiographical texts—canonical and otherwise—Playing House in the American West argues for a distinct regional literary tradition characterized by strategic representations of unconventional domestic life The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.” From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbors and eastern readers alike. The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles. Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation. The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.

This is the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Organized through several interrelated key concepts, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West addresses gender and sexuality from and across diverse and divergent methodologies. Comprising 34 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into four parts: Genealogies Bodies Movements Lands The volume features leading and newer scholars whose essays connect interdisciplinary fields including Indigenous Studies, Latinx and Asian American Studies, Western American Studies, and Queer, Feminist, and Gender Studies. Through innovative methodologies and reclaimed archives of knowledge, contributors model fresh frameworks for thinking about relations of power and place, gender and genre, settler colonization and decolonial resistance. Even as they reckon with the ongoing gendered and racialized violence at the core of the American West, contributors forge new lexicons for imagining alternative Western futures. This pathbreaking collection will be invaluable to scholars and students studying the origins, myths, histories, and legacies of the American West. This is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies.

This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.

This work provides a compelling explanation of something that has bedeviled a number of feminist scholars: Why did popular authors like Edna Ferber continue to write conventional fiction while living lives that were far from conventional? Amanda J. Zink argues that white writers like Ferber and Willa Cather avoided the subject of their own domestic labor by writing about the performance of domestic labor by “others,” showing that American print culture, both in novels and through advertisements, moved away from portraying women as angels in the house and instead sought to persuade other women to be angels in their houses. Zink further explores lesser-known works such as Mexican American cookbooks and essays in Indian boarding school magazines to show how women writers “dialoging domesticity” exemplify the cross-cultural encounters between “colonial domesticity” and “sovereign domesticity.” By situating these interpretations of literature within their historical contexts, Zink shows how these writers championed and challenged the ideology of domesticity.

Addressing everything from the details of everyday life to recreation and warfare, this two-volume work examines the social, political, intellectual, and material culture of the American "Old West," from the California Gold Rush of 1849 to the end of the 19th century. What was life really like for ordinary people in the Old West? What did they eat, wear, and think? How did they raise their children? How did they interact with government? What did they do for fun? This encyclopedia provides readers with an engaging and detailed portrayal of the Old West through the examination of social, cultural, and material history. Supported by the most current research, the multivolume set explores various aspects of social history—family, politics, religion, economics, and recreation—to illuminate aspects of a society's emotional life, interactions, opinions, views, beliefs, intimate relationships, and connections between the individual and the greater world. Readers will be exposed to both objective reality and subjective views of a particular culture; as a result, they can create a cohesive, accurate impression of life in the Old West during the second half of the 1800s.

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies

In this volume experienced and new college- and university-level teachers will find practical, adaptable strategies for designing or updating courses in western American literature and western studies. Teaching Western American Literature features the latest developments in western literary research and cultural studies as well as pedagogical best practices in course development. Contributors provide practical models and suggestions for courses and assignments while presenting concrete strategies for teaching works both inside and outside the canon. In addition, Brady Harrison and Randi Lynn Tanglen have assembled insights from pioneering western studies instructors with workable strategies and practical advice for translating this often complex material for classrooms from freshman writing courses to graduate seminars. Teaching Western American Literature reflects the cutting edge of western American literary study, featuring diverse approaches allied with women’s, gender, queer, environmental, disability, and Indigenous studies and providing instructors with entrée into classrooms of leading scholars in the field.