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West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Paperback)

~ Jane Tompkins (Author) "Near the beginning of Hondo, one of Louis L'Amour's best-known novels, the hero discovers the remains of a fight between a band of Apaches and..." (more)
Key Phrases: purple sage, Buffalo Bill, Case Studies, Lone Ranger (more...)

3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Kindle Edition $9.99 Available for download now. Published March 26, 1992	Kindle Edition, March 26, 1992	$9.99	--	--
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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In her first book, Sensational Designs (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1985), Tompkins argues that serious study of the sentimental novels America produced in the 19th century offers rewards. The next major genre to make an appearance in popular American fiction was the Western. Here, Tompkins examines the Western as it appears in print and on film. She discusses The Virginian , Riders of the Purple Sage , and Louis L'Amour's Last of the Breed at some length and gives a detailed description of her visit to the Buffalo Bill Museum. Other parts of her book range farther afield. Tompkins attempts to forge a Welt anschauung of the Western, which of course leads to an occasional overgeneralization, but her personalized intellectual response to the genre makes this book interesting and thought-provoking.
- John Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

``...the bodies of the silent men of Company C lay wide-eyed to the rain and bare-chested to the wind...dead now in the long grass on a lonely hill, west of everything.'' So ends a paragraph of Louis L`Amour's Hondo, a work that readers of Tompkins's rapt reevaluation of the ecstasies of Western novels, film, and icons will come to revere as much as does Tompkins herself (English/Duke Univ.). The two heroes who loom largest in Tompkins's pantheon are L`Amour and Zane Grey. She quotes brilliantly, offering the reader time and again ``the fully saturated moment,'' showing a Grey who is a poet with as furiously rich and sexually Pan-spirited a sense of landscape as D.H. Lawrence. Tompkins sees the Western as a cannon-burst against sentimental women's fiction in the 19th century, against the dominance of women's culture and the women's invasion of the public sphere between 1880 and 1920. ``It's about men's fear of losing their mastery, and hence their identity, both of which the Western tirelessly reinvents.'' Her larger themes are death, women, the language of men (``yup''), landscape, horses, and cattle--all of which she follows in John Wayne classics, The Searchers and Red River, as well as in Alan Ladd's Shane. But her richest chapters are those on Grey, who ``doesn't know that he is making the rim rock and the sage slopes enact the birth of a new age, but that is what he is doing.'' His is a landscape with blatant but unacknowledged sexual imagery, as in Riders of the Purple Sage: ``She went stone-blind in the fury of a passion that had never before showed its power. Lying upon her bed, sightless, voiceless, she was a writhing, living flame.'' Some academic clinkers, but mainly right down to sod. (Ten halftones--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (April 29, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195082680
ISBN-13: 978-0195082685
Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #536,838 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!

Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
Near the beginning of Hondo, one of Louis L'Amour's best-known novels, the hero discovers the remains of a fight between a band of Apaches and a company of U.S. cavalrymen. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
purple sage

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Buffalo Bill, Case Studies, Lone Ranger, Red River, The Last of the Breed, Zane Grey, John Wayne, New York, Joe Mack, Riders of the Purple Sage, Jane Withersteen, Owen Wister, Wild West, Civil War, Plains Indian Museum, Wyatt Earp, Film Stills Archive, Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas, Louis L'Amour, Pearl Street, Sarah Wister, Doc Holliday, Lonely Are the Brave, Black Star

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!

Citations (learn more)

This book cites 53 books:

Riders of the Purple Sage (Dover Thrift Editions) by Zane Grey on 10 pages
Riders of The Purple Sage by Zane Grey on 10 pages
In His Steps by M. Charles Sheldon on 4 pages
In His Steps by Charles Sheldon on 4 pages
High Noon (VHS) by Gary Cooper on 4 pages

See all 53 books this book cites

100 books cite this book:

Wanted Dead or Alive: THE AMERICAN WEST IN POPULAR CULTURE by Richard Aquila on 4 pages
The Blackwell Guide to Theology and Popular Culture (Blackwell Guides to Theology) by Kelton Cobb on 4 pages
Confessions of the Critics: North American Critics' Autobiographical Moves by H. Aram Veeser in Front Matter, page 16, and page 75
Confessions of the Critics: North American Critics' Autobiographical Moves by H. Aram Veeser in Front Matter, page 16, and page 176
Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (Comedia) by Christ Holmlund in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)

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Books on Related Topics (learn more)

Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide by Leonard Maltin

Discusses:

Zane Grey by Thomas H. Pauly

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Westerns by Lee Clark Mitchell

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3.8 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars essential but NOT good -- see Cowboy Metaphysics instead, March 30, 2004

By	K. Kehler (B.C., Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Tompkins made her name as a professional literary critic, principally (but not only) for her book on Reader-response criticism, which somewhat counter-intuitively holds that texts' meanings are dependent on readers' values and assumptions, etc. I mention this because she brings her assumptions to bear on a genre (Westerns) that she fundamentally doesn't understand ... or want to understand. Tompkins' book will tell you plenty about what sophisticated literary theorists will do with texts (how to situate them in cultural traditions and how to discuss the relationship between cultural artifacts), but for a truly enlightening discussion of Westerns, you should turn to Peter A. French's magnificent treatment: Cowboy Metaphysics, Ethics and Death in Westerns. French's book has all the merits that Tompkins book should (also) have had. It is lucid, argumentative, illuminating and thoughfully respectful of the details of the Westerns he discusses.

For a fascinating read turn to French instead. Where else can you get a discussion of Westerns that illuminates this genre by way of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Homer, Melville, Kant and Aeschylus?

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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wow!, October 6, 2000

By	Amy Hanson (Tacoma, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This is an amazing book. Jane Tompkins looks at the different symbols in westerns -- cattle, horses, food, work -- and discusses what they *mean*. She also discusses the evolution of the genre -- where it came from, and what it was a reaction to, and why the different symbols work together so well. And all the while, her writing style is engaging and interesting and pulls you along as you nod and say "Oh! Right!" You don't have to be a student of writing to enjoy this book. The information translates immediately to male-female communication, and to interactions you may have with colleagues. You'll find yourself gutting through some project and saying in a John Wayne accent "well, it's the cowboy way, ain't it?"

Highly enjoyable. An amazing piece of work.

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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars More personal comment than literary criticism, September 12, 2009

By	Thomas J. Huber "TJ the Grouch" (Columbia, TN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Ms. Tompkins makes many good points about Westerns and how they came to be, but she negates her best points with her personal agenda of modern attitudes and political correctness. She obviously appreciates Westerns, but she doesn't seem to really get them. If you are looking for a good book about Westerns try Peter A. French's COWBOY METAPHYSICS. He even discusses Ms. Tompkins key points so you can avoid reading her personal and political commentary which she blatantly weaves throughout the entire book.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Yee- Ha!
An interesting look at Westerns from personal and literary perspectives. Focuses attention on a rich genre that has not been looked at enough by the fields of literary criticism... Read more

Published 10 months ago by Justin Reilly

5.0 out of 5 stars Home On the Range
Tompkins is infuriatingly cutting-edge, but in the end she's just a gal who likes men in jeans serving up piping hot pork and beans. Read more

Published on June 4, 2007 by David Schweizer

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