True West and Lying Marks: "The Englishman's Boy, Blood Meridian," and the Paradox of the Revisionist Western

[...]in the 1960s and 1970s, shaken by an era of traumatic political events and social upheavals, western novelists got serious, looked beneath the familiar myth to find the reality that it had suppressed, and began producing revisionist westerns intended to represent more accurately the unsettling...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inTexas studies in literature and language Vol. 55; no. 4; pp. 406 - 433
Main Author Evans, David H.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Austin University of Texas Press 22.12.2013
University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
Subjects
American literature
Analysis
Blood
Deception
Derrida, Jacques
Historical revisionism
Larceny
Literature
Lying
McCarthy, Cormac
McCarthy, Cormac (1933-2023)
Movies
Narratives
Nonviolence
Novelists
Novels
Paradoxes
Political factors
Portrayals
Scalp
Vanderhaeghe, Guy
Violence
Western fiction
Western stories
Westerns
United States
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Summary:[...]in the 1960s and 1970s, shaken by an era of traumatic political events and social upheavals, western novelists got serious, looked beneath the familiar myth to find the reality that it had suppressed, and began producing revisionist westerns intended to represent more accurately the unsettling consequences of settling the West. Scalping, in this sense, is a form of writing, as Glanton glancingly acknowledges when he refers to one scalp as a "receipt" (98), a document that enters an economy of scriptive exchange as soon as it leaves the head.16 If, as is typically the case, one's initial encounter with Blood Meridian is likely to lead to a search for the meaning of all this violence, a more prolonged attention to the text suggests that its real subject is the violence of all meaning.
ISSN:0040-4691
1534-7303
DOI:10.7560/TSLL55403