Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2006
Abstract
The new edition is a useful overview of six major directors, a densely descriptive homage to the genre, and a touchstone in the history of film genre criticism. Critics familiar with the 1969 edition will appreciate the way Kitses has updated and elaborated on his initial premises. Readers new to Western genre criticism should see the work as an important strand in a broad range of critical discourses that now includes, among others, studies of gender in Westerns by Lee Clark Mitchell and Jane Tompkins, materialist, industry-based analyses by Peter Stanfield, Peter Lehman's extensive readings and re-readings of John Ford's The Searchers, deconstructive approaches to representations of Native Americans by Armando Jose Prats, and archival work on silent Westerns by Scott Simmons. For those who wish to understand the formative contributions of structuralism in genre studies, Horizons West is essential reading.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:1 (Winter 2006). Copyright 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.