Critical Perspectives on the Western

For decades, the Western film has been considered a dying breed of cinema, yet filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Ethan and Joel Coen find new ways to reinvigorate the genre. As Westerns continue to be produced for contemporary audiences, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the relevance of this enduring genre.

In Critical Perspectives on the Western: From A Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained, Lee Broughton has compiled a wide-ranging collection of essays that look at various forms of the genre, on both the large and small screen. Contributors to this volume consider themes and subgenres, celebrities and authors, recent idiosyncratic engagements with the genre, and the international Western. These essays also explore issues of race and gender in the various films discussed as well as within the film genre as a whole.

Among the films and television programs discussed in this volume are The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford; Django Kill; Justified; Meek’s Cutoff; Tears of the Black Tiger; Appaloosa; The Frozen Limits; and Red Harvest.Featuring a diverse selection of chapters that represent current thinking on the Western. Critical Perspectives on the Western will appeal to fans of the genre, film students, and scholars alike.

Lee Broughton is a freelance writer, critic, film programmer, and lecturer in film and cultural studies. He is the author of The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film (2016).

In addition to Broughton, the volume’s contributors are Jenny Barrett, Pete Falconer, Christopher Frayling, Jesus Angel Gonzalez, Mark Goodall, Timothy Hughes, Thomas Klein, Geoff Mann, Cynthia J. Miller, Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Ivo Ritzer, and John White.