The frontier and Western expansionism are so quintessentially a part 
of American history that the literature of the West and Southwest is 
in some senses the least regional and the most national literature of 
all. The frontier—the place where cultures meet and rewrite themselves 
upon each other's texts—continues to energize writers whose fiction 
evokes, destroys, and rebuilds the myth in ways that attract popular 
audiences and critics alike.

    Sara L. Spurgeon focuses on three writers whose works not only 
exemplify the kind of engagement with the theme of the frontier that 
modern authors make, but also show the range of cultural voices that 
are present in Southwestern literature: Cormac McCarthy, Leslie 
Marmon Silko, and Ana Castillo. Her central purposes are to consider 
how the differing versions of the Western "mythic" tales are being 
recast in a globalized world and to examine the ways in which they 
challenge and accommodate increasingly fluid and even dangerous 
racial, cultural, and international borders.

    In Spurgeon's analysis, the spaces in which the works of these 
three writers collide offer some sharply differentiated visions but also 
create new and unsuspected forms, providing the most startling 
insights. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, the new myths are 
the expressions of the larger culture from which they spring, both a 
projection onto a troubled and troubling past and an insistent, 
prophetic vision of a shared future.

_________________________________________________________

SARA L. SPURGEON is an assistant professor of literature of the 
American Southwest at Texas Tech University. She co-authored 
Writing the Southwest, a literary biography of fourteen contemporary 
southwestern authors, and has had several short stories published. 
Her short story "River Man" won the D. H. Lawrence prize for fiction 
in 1993.


Number Nineteen: Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies 
in the Humanities


What people are saying about this book

“Spurgeon has done an excellent job of tracing the frontier myth 
through works of the late twentieth century. She proves that there 
continues to be a conversation—if not a consensus—about what the 
West means in American literature.”—Pacific Historical Review, May 
2007

"Contributing to and complicating western literary history, Exploding 
the Western offers a convincing argument for the persistence of the 
American frontier myth in contemporary western literature while 
demonstrating the frontier myth's own transnational roots . . . treats the 
frontier myth as a complex rather than a homogenous discourse, and 
this insight leads to compelling readings of three major western writers."
This book will be of interest not only to literary scholars, but also to 
those interested in the complex history of frontier mythology."—Western 
Historical Quarterly, Autumn 2006

"In Exploding the Western, Sara Spurgeon provides original, nuanced, 
and provocative reading of three major American writers: Cormac 
McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ana Castillo. Spurgeon’s carefully 
researched and thoughtful interpretations offer new insights into the 
work of these three important literary figures, while, at the same time, 
she illuminates how McCarthy, Silko, and Castillo challenge notions of 
the West and Southwest that have been used to powerfully influence a 
sense of national identity. Once having read this book, no one will ever 
think of the United States and the American West as they did before. 
This is a truly revelatory book."—Daniel Cooper Alarcon, University of 
Arizona

"Deftly written and analytically sophisticated, Spurgeon's Exploding 
the Western examines the continuing vitality of the myth of the 
western frontier, reading it now as a myth that engages racial and 
ethnic politics as well as the porous nature of national borders in a 
globalizing world."—Annette Kolodny, author of The Lay of the Land
and The Land before Her