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Endorsements
Gunslinging Justice presents a fresh take on an old genre, reading American Westerns in a variety of media alongside the historical development of the American legal system. Scholars have read the Western as either an expression of masculine anxieties over economic and social restratifications, or as a fantasy of swift extralegal violence at odds with the procedural stress of American law. Gunslinging justice argues instead that when examined alongside changes in justifiable homicide laws and gun rights jurisprudence in the United States Western shootouts are less overtly 'anti-law' than has been previously assumed. While the genre's climactic shootouts may look like a putatively masculine opposition to the codified and mediated American legal system, this gun violence is actually enshrined in the development of American laws regulating self-defense and gun possession. The climactic gun violence of a seminal Western text like Owen Wister's 1902 novel, The Virginian, or the classic 1952 film High Noon, then, seeks not to oppose 'the law,' but rather to expand its scope. Why this ritualistic, atavistic, formula still works after more than a century is, at heart, rather simple: revenge and justice are deeply satisfying imaginative fantasies and the genre's gun fetish reifies several core national tenets like individual liberty, economic opportunity, and self-reliance. How the Western genre endures, the changes in the style and iconography that enable the staid genre to resonate anew, is the topic of this book.
Reviews
Gunslinging Justice presents a fresh take on an old genre, reading American Westerns in a variety of media alongside the historical development of the American legal system. Scholars have read the Western as either an expression of masculine anxieties over economic and social restratifications, or as a fantasy of swift extralegal violence at odds with the procedural stress of American law. Gunslinging justice argues instead that when examined alongside changes in justifiable homicide laws and gun rights jurisprudence in the United States Western shootouts are less overtly 'anti-law' than has been previously assumed. While the genre's climactic shootouts may look like a putatively masculine opposition to the codified and mediated American legal system, this gun violence is actually enshrined in the development of American laws regulating self-defense and gun possession. The climactic gun violence of a seminal Western text like Owen Wister's 1902 novel, The Virginian, or the classic 1952 film High Noon, then, seeks not to oppose 'the law,' but rather to expand its scope. Why this ritualistic, atavistic, formula still works after more than a century is, at heart, rather simple: revenge and justice are deeply satisfying imaginative fantasies and the genre's gun fetish reifies several core national tenets like individual liberty, economic opportunity, and self-reliance. How the Western genre endures, the changes in the style and iconography that enable the staid genre to resonate anew, is the topic of this book.
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press is a leading UK publisher known for excellent research in the humanities and social sciences.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Manchester University Press
- Publication Date August 2018
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 9781526126160 / 1526126168
- Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
- ReadershipGeneral/trade; College/higher education; Professional and scholarly
- Publish StatusPublished
- Dimensions216 X 138 mm
- Reference Code10561
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