Weird Westerns

Kerry Fine is an instructor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Michael K. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Maine–Farmington. Rebecca M. Lush is an associate professor at California State University, San Marcos. Sara L. Spurgeon is a professor of American literature at Texas Tech University.

Weird Westerns is an exploration of the hybrid western genre—an increasingly popular and visible form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, and conventions with elements drawn from other genres, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy.

Introduction: Westworld(s): Race, Gender, Genre in the Weird Western Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon Part 1. The Weird West, Past and Present 1. Attack of the Monstrous Vegetable: Bret Harte’s Pioneer Nightmare and “Miscegenation” Dream Tara Penry 2. Strange Country: Sexuality and the Feminine in Robert Coover’s Ghost Town Eric Meljac and Alex Hunt 3. A Selective History: Identity and Identification in Deadlands Nicholas William Moll Part 2. Native Reclamations and Representations 4. Mongrel Transmotion: The Werewolf and the Were/Wear/Where-West in Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels Joshua T. Anderson 5. Indianizing the Western: Semiotic Tricksterism in William Sanders’s Journey to Fusang 000 Sara L. Spurgeon 6. Magnificence and Metas in Professional Westerns Domino Renee Perez Part 3. Surrogate indians and Other Indigenous Metaphors 7. Defamiliarizing the Western on the Extraterrestrial Frontier: Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape Johannes Fehrle 8. Shining the Light of Civilization: The Savage Other of the Frontier in Firefly and Serenity 000 Meredith Harvey 9. Racial Metaphors and Vanishing indians in Wynonna Earp, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Emma Bull’s Territory Rebecca M. Lush Part 4. The African American Presence in the Weird Western 10. The Mad Black Woman in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower Jacob Burg 11. Uncle Tom’s Cabin Showdown: Stowe, Tarantino, and the Minstrelsy of the Weird West 000 Joshua D. Smith 12. Race and Gender in the Time Travel Western Michael K. Johnson Part 5. The Undead in the Weird Western 13. Go West, Old Man: Or, Buffalo Bill and the “Yellow Peril” in Zeppelins West Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper 14. amc’s The Walking Dead and the Restructuring of Gender and Race on the Neofrontier000 Scott Pearce 15. Afterword: This Is (Not) the End Stephen Graham Jones Contributors Index