The Post-2000 Film Western Contexts, Transnationality, Hybridity

This collection of thirteen essays by scholars from the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Australia and Hong Kong, explores the trajectories of the post-2000 film Western in American, transnational, inter-generic, and inter-medial contexts. With examples ranging from major American films, through acclaimed international productions, to works such as experimental films and television commercials, the contributors seek to account for the appeal and currency of the film Western today. They are concerned with the issues of historical revisionism and contemporary ideologies, of audience and industry, of the cross-pollination of film genres, and highlight a plethora of problems that contemporary Westerns have addressed. They make a case for the Western's capacity for renewal – through the reworking of staple themes, incorporation of other film genres, varied political implications, and foreign appropriations.

Marek Paryz is Associate Professor and Chair of the Section of American Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland.
 
John R. Leo is Distinguished Chair of American Studies at the University of Rhode Island, USA, and former director of the URI's Film Media Program.

Notes on Contributors
Introduction; Marek Paryz
PART I: THE WESTERN 'AT HOME': DIALOGUES WITH THE TRADITION
1.'Is There Actually Any Jiménez?': Believing as Seeing in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; Lee Clark Mitchell
2.'You Must Pay for Everything in This World One Way or Another': True Grit and the Economics of Justice; Martin Holtz
3.A Spaghetti Southern: Django Unchained; Rob Kroes
4.Who Was That Masked Man? Conception and Reception in The Lone Ranger; Shelley Armitage
PART II: THE WESTERN 'ABROAD': TRANSNATIONAL VARIATIONS
5.'Crossing the Beast': American Identity and Frontier Mythology in Sin Nombre; Matthew Carter
6.Wild West in the Mild West: Reading the Canadian Anti-Western through The Englishman's Boy; David Stirrup
7.'Australia. What Fresh Hell Is This?': Conceptualizing the Australian Western in The Proposition; Emma Hamilton
8.Staging the 'Wild Wild East': Decoding the Western in East Asian Films; Vivian P. Y. Lee
PART III: THE WESTERN 'OUT THERE': THE ALLURE OF THE FANTASTIC
9.Decolonizing the Western: A Revisionist Analysis of Avatar with a Twist; M. Elise Marubbio
10. The Post-Apocalyptic Western as a Bookish Genre: The Book of Eli's Vision of an Archival Future; Andrew S. Gross
11. The War on Terror and Intersecting Film Genres in Jonah Hex; Marek Paryz
PART IV: THE WESTERN 'ELSEWHERE': CLASSIC INSPIRATIONS AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES
12. Avant-Garde and Experimental Westerns: The Frontier at the Limits of the Moving Image; Alexandra Keller
13. 'The Faces May Change, the Names, but They're There, Now and Fifty Years from Now': Conflations of Cold War Westerns in the Post-9/11 USAF Recruitment Commercials; Józef Jaskulski
Index