Project MUSE®: Western American Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Western American Literature.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1966) through current issue (with a gap in volume 16)Latest Articles: Western American LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Western American Literature1948-71420043-3462Latest articles in Western American Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Listening to Unlearn: Sarah Winnemucca’s Testimony and the Reversal of Civilization Discourse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983694
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The past few years have witnessed an increased willingness to acknowledge the violence perpetuated by the Federal Indian Boarding School System and its central role in what Bryan Newland (Ojibwe) has named “the twin policy of Indian territorial dispossession and Indian assimilation” (1: 21). The discovery in May 2021 of a mass grave of 215 Indigenous children—some as young as three years old—on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia brought international attention to the deeply embedded structural violence of “civilization” logics and the ongoing implications of these state-sanctioned, often religious-run, institutions that remained in operation well into the twentieth century
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallListening to Unlearn: Sarah Winnemucca’s Testimony and the Reversal of Civilization Discourse2026-02-19text/htmlen-USListening to Unlearn: Sarah Winnemucca’s Testimony and the Reversal of Civilization Discourse2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®926642026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Rewriting the Medical Frontier: Gynecological History and Political Futures in Anna North’s Outlawed
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983695
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When the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling landed on 24 June 2023 it not only put access to at-will abortion in jeopardy but injected vulnerability into an array of reproductive issues.1 At a time when fetal personhood has taken on new legal legitimacy,2 when lawmakers continually reintroduce abortion bans in states that have already enshrined abortion rights,3 and a brain-dead young woman can be kept alive against her family’s wishes to complete a pregnancy,4 it is difficult to imagine a world in which access to sexual health care survives further restriction. During the recent 2024 US election cycle, tales of women dying due to lack of abortion care flooded social media and television ads. As reproductive uncertainty
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallRewriting the Medical Frontier: Gynecological History and Political Futures in Anna North’s Outlawed2026-02-19text/htmlen-USRewriting the Medical Frontier: Gynecological History and Political Futures in Anna North’s Outlawed2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®819642026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Dumped Head First into a Rain Barrel: Bret Harte, Olive Harper, Public and Personal Myth, and Another Wild Tale from the Old West
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983696
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In her unpublished memoir, “The Stormy Petrel,” penned during the last days of her life, the writer Olive Harper (née Nancy Ellen Burrell, 1842–1915) recounts an incident she says took place when she was twelve or thirteen years old.1 At that time she was attending a two-room schoolhouse, known as the Pavilion, in the fledgling community of Oakland, California (Harper, “Stormy Petrel” vol. 1; Bagwell 98; “Ye Olden Oakland Days”). The story also involves Harper’s youngest brother, Henry, who was then eight or nine years old, and a neighbor named Frank Hart, who was then eighteen or nineteen years old. Harper relates the tale as follows:There was a wide porch around the Broadway and Fifth Street sides of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallDumped Head First into a Rain Barrel: Bret Harte, Olive Harper, Public and Personal Myth, and Another Wild Tale from the Old West2026-02-19text/htmlen-USDumped Head First into a Rain Barrel: Bret Harte, Olive Harper, Public and Personal Myth, and Another Wild Tale from the Old West2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®616782026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19¡Ay Tú! Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros ed. by Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983697
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¡Ay Tú! a phrase used on Sandra Cisneros’s personalized Texas license plates, is what editors Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano say is Cisneros’s act of reclamation that “reimagines what it is like to embody Latinidad and the feminine without shame” (x). As the first book-length collection of scholarly essays on Cisneros, ¡Ay Tú! is an interdisciplinary body of work that examines the interconnectedness of Cisneros’s reclamation and reimagining of life and the way she gives voice to those who have been silenced and cut down to size by “ay tú.” Divided into three parts, the works in this collection weave together Cisneros’s long oeuvre of writing and map the trajectory of her experiences and personal connections
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmall¡Ay Tú! Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros ed. by Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-US¡Ay Tú! Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros ed. by Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®79102026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry ed. by George Getschow (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983698
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It is nigh-on impossible to speak about Larry McMurtry without considering the questions of legacy his work both wrestled with and evoked. Despite self-effacingly referring to himself as a “Minor Regional Novelist” (vii), earlier works such as Horseman, Pass By (1961) represented a groundbreaking departure from the historical fictions of the Wild West that had long shaped depictions of the region. His essay collection In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968) represented a particularly disparaging challenge to the cowboy myths that still informed Texan identity: myths that were later, in a tremendous fit of irony, perpetuated by his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Lonesome Dove (1985). Despite the huge critical and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallPastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry ed. by George Getschow (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USPastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry ed. by George Getschow (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®73922026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Salt Folk by Ryan Habermeyer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983699
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There is a dark sense of comfort when it comes to reading Ryan Habermeyer’s collection of work, Salt Folk. It feels like a friend setting their hand on the top of your back and then, all of a sudden, their fingers work their way under your skin, and then your veins, muscles, and tendons become all tied and tangled up between their fingers. Habermeyer is unique when it comes to the craft of writing by being able to suspend the reader in a complete yet entertaining state of uncertainty. During my first reading session of this collection, I sat under the lamplight of my desk. Every one of my senses stood close to falling off the edge of the world due to the sheer variety of stories that Habermeyer was able to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallSalt Folk by Ryan Habermeyer (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USSalt Folk by Ryan Habermeyer (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®51442026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy,1965–1999 by Evan Brier (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983700
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Evan Brier’s Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy,1965–1999 examines the novel and the publishing industry in relation to what Brier calls the mattering economy, those spaces that value symbolic capital and determine what matters in a cultural context. In short, Brier’s book questions why the novel seems to matter less than it did in the mid-twentieth century. Composed of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, Novel Competition is a “literary-institutional history” interrogating “the relationship between a prestige economy and the real economy” (2). This rigorous study provides a nuanced perspective on the role of the novel, considering race and geopolitics while asking the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallNovel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy,1965–1999 by Evan Brier (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USNovel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy,1965–1999 by Evan Brier (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®69112026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Indigenous Journeys, Transatlantic Perspectives: Relational Worlds in Contemporary Native American Literature ed. by Anna M. Brigido-Corachán (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983701
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Trans-Indigeneity. Decolonization. Relationality. These are some central foci in Indigenous Journeys, edited by Anna M. Brigido-Corachán. The collection of essays derived from an international symposium: “Teaching and Theorizing Native American Literature as World Literature” in Valencia, Spain, 2018. Though the contributors are non-Native and mostly European academics, the collected critical essays demonstrate a turn to Indigenous-centered methodologies, highlighting place-based and traditional knowledge. Echoing the importance of the local-grounded and community-based critical conversation as well as the attention to the urgency for the global Indigenous dialogue in Chadwick Allen’s Trans-Indigenous, Indigenous
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallIndigenous Journeys, Transatlantic Perspectives: Relational Worlds in Contemporary Native American Literature ed. by Anna M. Brigido-Corachán (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USIndigenous Journeys, Transatlantic Perspectives: Relational Worlds in Contemporary Native American Literature ed. by Anna M. Brigido-Corachán (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®76702026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction ed. by Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason De Lara Molesky (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983702
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Asking us to read climate fiction as a product of the Capitalocene, Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction serves as a critical contribution to two rapidly converging fields, climate humanities and environmental justice. The resulting essays show how climate narratives can function as a form of protest literature that highlights “the gulf between the responsibility for and suffering from climate change” and how those least responsible are also least equipped to survive (1). Editors Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason De Lara Molesky divide their volume’s thirteen essays into three parts designed to clarify these intersections of class dynamics and ecological crisis.Part I, “Class
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallCli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction ed. by Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason De Lara Molesky (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USCli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction ed. by Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason De Lara Molesky (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®78952026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19The Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy by Timothy P. Schilling (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983703
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Four books about Norman Maclean’s life and work have been published in the last four years. These four books cement the legacy of Maclean’s one published book of semi-autobiographical fiction that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1976, the collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. These four new books include Rebecca McCarthy’s Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers (University of Washington, 2024) and John Maclean’s Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and Rivers (Mariner, 2021), which provide invaluable biographical and autobiographical context for Maclean’s life and writing process. The other two study Maclean’s writing through a scholarly and philosophical lens: George Jensen and Heidi
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallThe Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy by Timothy P. Schilling (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USThe Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy by Timothy P. Schilling (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®79242026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Wild Forest Home: Stories of Conservation in the Pacific Northwest by Betsy L. Howell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983704
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The Forest Service has a decent track record of producing fascinating memoirs, and Wild Forest Home by Betsy L. Howell joins Toward a Natural Forest by Jim Furnish, Forty Years a Forester by Elers Koch, and Fire Season by Philip Connors (to name just a few) in this niche of American letters. Howell takes the reader into the fog-wreathed forests of the Pacific Northwest on wildlife surveys to study spotted owls, marbled murrelets, martens, rough-skinned newts, and ensatinas. These field notes from the work of a wildlife biologist are interspersed with timely and moving accounts of working on wildfires and more reflective essays on the craft of writing and the art of stewardship.“Was this really work?” Howell asks
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallWild Forest Home: Stories of Conservation in the Pacific Northwest by Betsy L. Howell (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USWild Forest Home: Stories of Conservation in the Pacific Northwest by Betsy L. Howell (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®64832026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western ed. by Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983705
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If you are unfamiliar with the notion of a “weird western,” Hell-Bent for Leather will readily solve that problem. A follow-up volume to the editors’ 2020 Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre, this new work quickly defines a “weird western” as a cultural text that blends canonical aspects of Westerns with horror, science fiction, or fantasy. Highlighting television, film, fiction, and video games from the 1960s to the 2020s, this book asks questions about the liberatory power of queering/weirding (or “qweirding”) the Western genre. This work excels at balancing the broad implications of sexual flexibility in a collectively imagined “West” with the specificity of in-depth analysis, with enough examples to feel fully
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallHell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western ed. by Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USHell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western ed. by Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®65782026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19A Resonant Ecology by Max Ritts (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983706
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In 2001 an all too familiar story was being played out on the North Coast, a quasi-municipal administrative district in British Columbia, Canada. With the support of the Canadian government, the Enbridge energy company proposed a multibillion dollar shipping project that would bisect marine habitats and remove people from their lands and their homes, primarily through industrial noise. In the same year, humpback whales reappeared where they had not been seen for some time along the channels of the region. The whale listening post Cetacea Lab, built on the unceded lands of the Gitga’at First Nation and operated with the permission of the nation’s leadership, became ground zero for both anti-Enbridge sentiment and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallA Resonant Ecology by Max Ritts (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USA Resonant Ecology by Max Ritts (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®74312026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19James by Percival Everett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983707
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James begins with a song—four songs to be exact, written in a font that mimics handwriting, making it difficult to decipher, although the tunes are familiar (one is “The Blue-Tail Fly”). Why place these songs in calligraphic font at the forefront of this novel? Well, that becomes clearer once one learns this is a story of language, how it shapes us, how it gives us power and agency, and how it can ultimately be used to write oneself “into being” (93). Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, which won a Pulitzer Prize in early May 2025, is a retelling of one of the most classic works of American literature, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of the infamous enslaved man Jim. Although
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallJames by Percival Everett (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USJames by Percival Everett (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®65432026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19A New Mexico Land Ethic Handbook by Richard L. Rubin, with Andrew Gulliford and Leeanna T. Torres (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983708
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Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac (1949), “There are two things that interest me: the relations of people to each other, and the relations of people to land” (qtd. in Rubin, Gulliford, and Torres xii). This sentiment is reiterated in Richard Rubin, Andrew Gulliford, and Leeanna Torres’s reflections within their 2024 anthology that details their personal relationship with land, A New Mexico Land Ethic Handbook.In the foreword Gulliford states, “Leopold’s thoughts still guide us. His emphasis on Land Ethic resonates across America” (xvi). Leopold’s legacy, to construct a nationally recognized Land Ethic, is also what drew Congress to set into legislation the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, which is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmallA New Mexico Land Ethic Handbook by Richard L. Rubin, with Andrew Gulliford and Leeanna T. Torres (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USA New Mexico Land Ethic Handbook by Richard L. Rubin, with Andrew Gulliford and Leeanna T. Torres (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®106482026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-192025 WLA Award Recipients
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983709
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Distinguished Achievement AwardFor an influential scholar or creative writer in western American literatureQuraysh Ali LansanaSusan J. Rosowski AwardFor outstanding teaching and creative mentoring in western American literary studiesJosé F. Aranda Jr., Rice UniversityThomas J. Lyon Book AwardFor most outstanding book published last year in western American literary and cultural studiesStephen Tatum, University of Utahfor Unhomely Wests: Essays from A to Z(University of Nebraska Press)Don D. Walker PrizeFor best essay published in western American literary studies in 2024Eve Eure, University of California–San Diegofor “Intergenerational Testimonials and the Politics of Black Cherokee Belonging,” published in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418/image/coversmall2025 WLA Award Recipients2026-02-19text/htmlen-US2025 WLA Award Recipients2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®43952026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19