A Study Of The American Western Novels

The American western novels constitute a popular genre with typical characteristics of America. It originated from the special circumstances of the early American society and has developed with the nation's growth. As a tradition of American literature, the genre has also entered into the American national character and influenced their cultural values. Hence, the novels provide a means of understanding the American society and culture. This dissertation, choosing the American western novels as its study object and having the ideas of the cultural aesthetics as its guide, tries to make its analysis go around the changes and the present conditions of the American culture and the western novels. In his analysis, the author pays special attention to the western novels as the American cultural phenomenon and to the American culture in the phenomenon of the western novels, and intends to emphasize a cultural consciousness in the study of the western novels, not only attaching importance to some external factors of literature and culture, but also to the internal relations of the American culture between the Westward Movement and the western novels. In this dissertation, the first chapter goes around the developing conditions of the study of the American western novels both at home and abroad, in order to make an exploration into the American western novels respectively from the different angles in the following chapters. The second chapter analyses James Fanimore Cooper, the precursor of the American national literature, who portrayed the American west and the frontier pioneers' romantic spirit by the figure of the Leather-Stocking and made the American literature nationalized. The third chapter interprets the viewpoint of the western frontier, namely "the garden of the Lord". The fourth chapter makes a detailed analysis of the figure of cowboy which stands for the American culture and the cowboy novels which depict the west. The fifth chapterstates how the American writers have made attempts to re-create the "frontier" concept in the American society, discusses the frontier mythos' impact and influence on contemporary American literature according to many contemporary American novelists' embedding elements of the frontier mythos into their novels, and makes an exploration into the identity in the American Indian novels of the west, in order to restore their true features. The sixth chapter pays more attention to the theme of the western novels: the pioneering spirit and going to civilization. The seventh chapter summarizes in a macro way the achievements of the contemporary American western novels in the thematic exploration and the artistic creativity since the Second World War.