Current Western TV Special Issue
The Summer 2012 issue of Western American Literature features Current Western TV. “The essays in this special issue,” says Guest Editor Michael K. Johnson, “suggest the range and diversity of western television. The issue seeks to expand the concept of the genre Western and to expand our understanding of the “place” of the Western. There series here combine or draw from multiple genres (police procedurals, biker tales, documentaries, reality TV, etc.) to create new versions of the Western, and they sometimes expand the setting of the Western to include places other than the traditionally defined American West.”
“While this issue celebrates the rebirth of the television Western in new twenty-first-century forms, the essays also suggest the necessity of critical engagement with a genre that continues to return to us a complicated, sometimes contradictory, alternately progressive and regressive reflection of our own cultural moment.”
Essays featured in this issue come from Jennifer Schell, Kerry Fine, Justin A. Joyce, Sara Humphreys, and book reviews are contributed by Cynthia J. Miller, Corey Dethier, Sue Matheson, Holly Jean Richard, D. B. Gough, Leonard Engel, Melinda Linscott, and John Hursh.
