Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall 1998, pp. 354-55
Abstract
Retrospectives on the twentieth century are becoming more and more common the closer we get to this century's close. The task of summing up an entire century's worth of ideas and art is daunting, to say the least, and while many of the works that attempt the task fall short, Richard Etulain's Re-Imagining the Modern American West manages to be comprehensive and inclusive, as well as fascinating. The book's quality and scope are not surprising: Etulain, director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico, is well-known through his numerous studies of the American West in both literature and history.
In his preface, Etulain promises "an overview of the cultural and intellectual history of the twentieth-century West" from a historian's rather than a cultural anthropologist's perspective. What follows is an engaging and extensive study of the general trends in the literature, history, and art of the twentieth-century American West. Some artists and historians from both traditional and marginalized groups-are covered individually and placed within a regional and historical context. In addition to his general overview, Etulain proposes some new and compelling theories about the region, its history, literature, and art.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska- Lincoln