Today the younger generation is incredulous or at least very skeptical when confronted with the totalizing statement that the western dominated the imaginary of the first seventy years of the twentieth century. Youth may be aware of some residual aspects of this cultural phenomenon, but it is difficult for them to accept the idea that two or three generations of American adolescents – and two generations of European ones – constructed their gendered identity on western heroes such as the Lone Ranger, Shane, Wyatt Earp, Davy Crockett, “Buffalo Bill” and subsequently on actors like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Alan Ladd, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Burt Lancaster, Randolph Scott, Clint Eastwood and so on. But data concerning both sales and derivative works is very reliable: no other genre matched the western until the 1970s, that is when the western entered its radical crisis and noir/detective/thriller fiction took over the globalized mass market. Conventionally, the history of the classic western begins with Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902), a great success soon to be overcome by Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). From then on the mass market was conquered by western novels by very prolific novelists and short story writers such as Zane Grey himself, A.B. Guthrie, Luke Short (Frederick Glidden), Frederick Manfred, Conrad Richter, Ernest Haycox, up to Louis L’Amour, who apparently sold more than two hundred and fifty million copies of his novels. If we turn to cinema, radio, television and comics, the public is even broader. For several decades most people – not just men – relied on the “western code” to construct their own identity. But the western was not created in 1902. It is in the nineteenth century that the western shapes its diverse heroes, its winning narrative structures, and moves from the “inventions” of James Fenimore Cooper to the formulaic texts which invaded the market at the time of the Civil War; it is in the second half of the nineteenth century, through the dime novels, that the western acquires its centrality and its mesmerizing force doomed to be so long-running. This essay tries to investigate the modes through which the western acquired such a leading role, following its genealogy and putting a particular emphasis on the disseminating power the western dime novels had from the early 1860s.

The Winning of the Western: Early Dissemination of a Literary Genre

ROSSO, Stefano
2016-01-01

Abstract

Today the younger generation is incredulous or at least very skeptical when confronted with the totalizing statement that the western dominated the imaginary of the first seventy years of the twentieth century. Youth may be aware of some residual aspects of this cultural phenomenon, but it is difficult for them to accept the idea that two or three generations of American adolescents – and two generations of European ones – constructed their gendered identity on western heroes such as the Lone Ranger, Shane, Wyatt Earp, Davy Crockett, “Buffalo Bill” and subsequently on actors like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Alan Ladd, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Burt Lancaster, Randolph Scott, Clint Eastwood and so on. But data concerning both sales and derivative works is very reliable: no other genre matched the western until the 1970s, that is when the western entered its radical crisis and noir/detective/thriller fiction took over the globalized mass market. Conventionally, the history of the classic western begins with Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902), a great success soon to be overcome by Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). From then on the mass market was conquered by western novels by very prolific novelists and short story writers such as Zane Grey himself, A.B. Guthrie, Luke Short (Frederick Glidden), Frederick Manfred, Conrad Richter, Ernest Haycox, up to Louis L’Amour, who apparently sold more than two hundred and fifty million copies of his novels. If we turn to cinema, radio, television and comics, the public is even broader. For several decades most people – not just men – relied on the “western code” to construct their own identity. But the western was not created in 1902. It is in the nineteenth century that the western shapes its diverse heroes, its winning narrative structures, and moves from the “inventions” of James Fenimore Cooper to the formulaic texts which invaded the market at the time of the Civil War; it is in the second half of the nineteenth century, through the dime novels, that the western acquires its centrality and its mesmerizing force doomed to be so long-running. This essay tries to investigate the modes through which the western acquired such a leading role, following its genealogy and putting a particular emphasis on the disseminating power the western dime novels had from the early 1860s.
2016
Rosso, Stefano
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10446/79639
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