The Cowboy uses literary, historical, folkloric, and pop cultural sources to document the cowboy's role in the culture of the American West. In doing so, Allmendinger makes use of early oral poems recited by cowboys in the course of their work, and later poems, histories, and autobiographies written by cowboys - most of which have never before been studied by scholars.
Reviews
In this path-breaking work, Allmendinger looks past the colorful cowboy of pulp fiction and film to investigate the equally colorful world that actual cowboys constructed for themselves. By assessing the workaday world of the cowboy with a mixture of exhaustive scholarly knowledge and intellectual brio, he reveals a set of sustaining myths to the stories, songs, and poems that cowboys themselves have written--myths by which they instilled their otherwise menial work with transcendent meaning and urgency. Branding read as skin grammar; livestock castration as a masculinizing activity; square dancing as intense moral drama; the lonesome cowboy as labor's ideal: these and other provocative insights emerge from this wonderfully innovative study--a study that not only gives us the cowboy as a serious cultural and laboring figure, but provides an interdisciplinary model in its combination of folklore, history, popular culture, and literary analysis. * Lee Mitchell, Princeton University *



Book Information
ISBN 9780195072433
Author Blake Allmendinger
Format Hardback
Page Count 216
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 524g
Dimensions(mm) 243mm * 162mm * 21mm