The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature ed. by Thomas J. Lyon (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 3 3 1 who “embodies the suffering of the country” (61). In M3 1Antonia, Cather ereated an apotheosis when “she sent Adam packing and claimed paradise for women, restoring to them a pyschosexual identification with nature and appropriating for them the promise of nature’s wildness” (79). Turning to Stafford, Rosowski extends this argument through the stories into an exami­ nation of The Mountain Lion, where its author “uses her pen as a divining rod to reveal sources of the psychosexual violence so thinly veiled in western lit­ erature” (137). Ultimately, Rosowski brings her revisionism to bear on the par­ adigmatic texts of male domination of western space—The Virginian, Riders of the Purple Sage, Shane—and argues that in them “the use of language reverts to ever simpler principles until it resides solely in the hero as Logos, the Word.” As such, the formula western is “American literature’s most radically regressive response to the charge to create a national epicor... togive birthto a nation” (172). Written by one of our leading critics, Birthing a Nation offers a revisionism to be reckoned with—its arguments are precise, well considered, and broadly synthetic. Within and without, there is an inevitability in the analysis that compels: with Birthing a Nation, Rosowski extends her daunting expertise on Cather into the whole of (western) American literature and so revises the field in critical ways.¿owyuittdatcimi. to Su4.au S6e m u fiieiettted s , f/. ewtA t&e Hhomai ty, "Book /tuw td a t tAe 'W A/f ‘^ ¡¡¡¡¡1 ^ '¿a Octa&cx 2000. '' ' The Literary West: A n Anthology of Western American Literature. Edited by Thomas ]. Lyon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 444 pages, $18.95. Reviewed by K ath leen Boardm an University of Nevada, Reno The Literary West is not a heavy tome loaded with hoary classics, sections and subsections, and exhaustive author notes. It’s lean and mean, with selec­ tions from forty writers arranged more or less chronologically from 1776 to 1995. Its contents emphasize place: not just the West as place, but a sense of place. The collection highlights the later twentieth century, with twenty post1960 writers and only seven selections from before 1900. Editor Thomas Lyon sees in the more recent work a new emphasis on serious writing about “the real West” and “a great renaissance in writing about place” (2, 208). The brief headnotes for each piece are authoritative and interesting, just what one would expect from an editor with decades of experience as a writer and scholar of western American literature. Lyon’s introduction alerts us to the dualities he sees in the West and to the WAL 3 5 . 3 f a l l 2 0 0 0 tensions suggested by the book’s contents. He identifies two Wests: the “stock” mythic, individualistic Wild West and the “real” West, “where people actually live and have effects on the landscape” (2). The former is “immediately and deeply persuasive,” the latter “more complex in its intentions and effects” (3). The Literary West allows us to sample both the persuasive and the complex. The collection demonstrates something of the variety of people, places, and problems in the West. Some of John Muir’s journal descriptions of the Sierra are here, and so is Denise Chavez’s “The Last of the Menu Girls,” set in an urban hospital in the Southwest. Life requires nerve and exertion not only in Gretel Ehrlich’s Wyoming but also in Amy Tan’s Chinatown. We can read N. Scott Momaday’s lyrical evocation of Rainy Mountain in conjunction with the cutthroat economics and shameful displacement portrayed in “Under the Lion’s Paw” and Farewell to Manzanar. Along with this diversity, the anthol­ ogy provides opportunities to trace important themes. Excerpts from The Virginian, Shane, Riders of the Purple Sage, The Big Sky, and Last of the Breed focus on the mythology of the hero. More than forty pages are devoted to the only drama in the anthology, Sam Shepard’s True West, which critically exam­ ines the West and the western hero. Lyon includes essayists and poets who invite or entreat us to alter our attitudes toward place: for example, William Kittredge, who...