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AMERICAN WESTERN NOVEL
[WESTERN NOVEL]
[PULP FICTION]
The American Western novel, commonly known as “the Western,” is a popular, male-dominated genre of fiction that uses clear, melodramatic formula plots to relate the sensational and often violent adventures of frontier men and women, scouts, Indian fighters, marshals, saloon girls, prostitutes, outlaws, ranchers, and cowboys in the late 19th-century American West.
The popular Western operates under clear and specific rules. The first of these is locale; the Western is named after its geographical setting, the American West at the precise historical moment of the frontier's passing, about 1860 to 1890-93, when the frontier was declared closed by both the US Census Bureau and historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Thus for John Cawelti, whose definitions of the genre in his The Six-Gun Mystique (1971) are an accepted standard, the Western is historically set between savagery and civilization, a transition represented by the genre's major character types: townspeople, savages, and heroes. The (mostly female) townspeople are agents of civilization divided into pioneers or common folk-Eastern escapees-or banker-villains. This first group is threatened either by bloodthirsty Indians or by outlaws who represent the violence, brutality, and ignorance of the frontier, which civilized society seeks to control and eliminate. The hero is an archetypal character torn between his loyalty to civilization and his wilderness past. Women in Westerns are characterized by a similar duality: they are either blonde, whereby they represent pure, genteel femininity; or brunette, in which they are more passionate and spontaneous, often slightly tainted by a mixture of race or a sinister past.
Another rule of Westerns is that their stories follow certain patterns arising from the Western environment they depict. Because there are so few basic narrative types of Westerns, many critics consider the genre simply a “horse opera” of formula novels. A useful outline by Western pulp writer Frank Gruber explains these limited plots and their variations: one, the Union Pacific or Epic Construction story (often of a railroad, stagecoach, wagon train, or telegraph line) in which various obstacles arise, from Indian attacks to outlaw holdups; two, the Ranch story (often ranchers against rustlers or ranchers against each other over water rights, with a cowboy hero emerging from the ranch hands); three, the Empire or Range War...