Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1988
Abstract
The title of this book is misleading for anyone who hasn't read the book. The book is not about the ways in which popular western fiction served to promote the West, nor even about the ways in which popular western fiction perpetuated the myth of the Wild West. The book is instead about the way the marketing of western formula fiction impinges upon the fiction; it argues that the conditions of composition, publication, and marketing exercise a shaping force on the details of the writing, and, more particularly, that the conditions of authorship for writers of popular western fiction often led those writers to covert individualized expression within the conventions of the genre.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly WINTER 1988. Copyright 1988 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.