The Neglected West: Contemporary Approaches to Western American Literature eds. by Amaia Ibarraran, Martin Simonson, and David Rio (review)

In his engaging foreword internationally celebrated Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga considers the power of myths in place-making, ranging from the Sanctuary of Loyola in his Basque homeland, to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, to the US West. In the introduction that follows Amaia Ibarraran takes up the mythic West and situates the collection as a “compilation of heterogeneous academic works that attempt to fill some of the voids that the western myth has created” (xviii). With these two contributions laying out both the power of the mythic West and the goal to “fill the voids,” readers may expect a disparate group of essays, with some taking on the myths more deliberately than others.

The collection is divided into three sections. Part 1, titled “Other Forms of Expression,” “sets out to take us beyond the ‘canonized’ and limiting vision of western adventure novels that describe and validate the Western experience” (xviii). The most successful of these essays is Linda K. Karell’s piece on different forms of western women’s autobiographical writing and the way they challenge “ideas of authentic western femininity” (23). Karell’s savvy, nuanced reading moves from memoirists Mary Clearman Blew, Judy Blunt, and Gail Caldwell to her mother’s advice columns in the Livingston, Montana, Park County Press.

Part 2, “Other Western Experiences,” includes essays that “propose a variety of exposures of different western realities” (xix). While the section heading offers the loosest of containers for what follows, a few stand out because they encourage readers to rethink the familiar or introduce us to unfamiliar texts. Olga González Calvo puts Caroline Kirkland in conversation with María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, highlighting issues of social class on two frontiers. Mari Jose Olaziregi examines the ways diasporas figure in Basque children’s and young adult literature, reminding us that, for exiles, the Americas, North and South, were “the ‘Other’” and that, for “decades, Basque-language literature represented the American continent as a place of perdition for Basque identity” (115, 118).

Part 3, “Other ‘Other’ Identities,” includes a lively essay by Cathryn Halverson that reconfigures western housekeeping through a reading of letters and essays by Louise Clappe, Isabella Bird, and Elinore Pruitt Stewart. In looking at their accounts of male housekeepers, Halverson finds “housekeeping serves as a way of bringing men and women together, or even of making the category of gender seem insignificant” (162). Alfonso Ceballos Muñoz offers a spirited reading of cowboy imagery in American gay culture and drama, tracing a twentieth-century history of appropriation of the cowboy image to its “demythologization … by means of articulating a renewed and reconstructed gay masculine image” from earlier “hypermacho” iterations (184).

The collection introduces writers and scholars who may be unfamiliar, alongside some new readings of the familiar. While the essays are uneven and the placement of essays in the three sections feels somewhat arbitrary, readers will nevertheless appreciate the broadening of the West beyond US borders, an emphasis on comparatist approaches, and bibliographic references to scholarly work on the West published outside the United States. The Neglected West provides a decentered perspective on the American West, a healthy trend in the field.