From Shane to Kill Bill

From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western is an original and compelling critical history of the American Western film.

• Provides an insightful overview of the American Western genre
• Covers the entire history of the Western, from 1939 to the present
• Analyses Westerns as products of a genre, as well as expressions of political and social desires
• Deepens an audience’s understanding of the genre’s most important works, including Shane, Stagecoach, The Searchers, Unforgiven, and Kill Bill
• Contains numerous illustrations of the films and issues discussed.

Original and compelling, From Shane to Kill Bill rethinks what American Western film has to offer us as a genre. Westerns have succeeded in dramatizing the individual, defining the frontier myth, and promoting the limits of masculinity. In tracing the development of the Western from 1939 to the present, this entertaining book demonstrates that the genre is also a successful vehicle for articulating class resentments and the social contradictions in American culture.

Offering sensitive readings that extend and deepen our understanding of the American West – from Shane, Stagecoach, and The Searchers to Heaven’s Gate, Unforgiven, and Kill Bill – this book discusses the Western in new and insightful ways. McGee appreciates the limits of this film genre, but also articulates its positive political value as an expression of social desires typically unspoken in American public discourse. Informative and compelling, this book suggests new understandings of this much-discussed genre.

Patrick McGee is Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Cinema, Theory, and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture (1997) and Joyce Beyond Marx: History and Desire in 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' (2001).