| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Reading The Virginian in the New West. Edited by Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. xix + 300 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95, £30.50, paper.)

For nearly a century scholars have cited Owen Wister's novel The Virginian (New York, 1902) as a notable work in launching or helping shape the format and content of the popular fictional and cinematic types known as Westerns. The contributors to this collection of newly written essays want to change that long tradition. They wish to enlarge and diversify the interpretive lenses used to discuss Wister's classic novel. In the eleven essays collected here, plus the coeditors' introduction and afterword, writers use feminist and literary theory, cultural criticism, and the New Historicism to broaden considerations of The Virginian. The essayists are particularly eager to discuss the novel dialogically—that is, in masculine and feminine, white and nonwhite, and surface and subtext oppositions. Melody Graulich, a coeditor of the volume, clarifies another of the book's purposes when she writes, "many of the contributors to this volume use the novel as a rich textual point of departure for rethinking the cultural politics of western American studies" (p. xiv).

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