Virginian (Classics Library (NTC))

by OwenWister (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.25

  Dime novels had featured some rather scrawny horse-bound tenders of cattle, but not until 1902 did the cowboy become a fully realized article of American culture. That year Owen Wister, a native of Philadelphia, published the novel that established the conventions of the western. An immediate best seller, it has never faded from public consciousness.

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $13.49

  The Virginian (1902) is Owen Wister's classic popular romance, and the most significant shaping influence on cowboy fiction. Its narrator, fresh from the East, encounters in Wyoming cattle country a strange, seductive and often violent land where the handsome figure of the Virginian battles for supremacy with Trampas and other ne'er-do-wells. His courtship of the genteel Vermont schoolteacher, Molly Wood, is a humourously observed battle of the sexes, demonstrating that the 'customs of the country' must eventually prevail. Rich in vernacular wit and portraying a romanticized escape from the decorum of the patrician East, The Virginian exudes a sense of redemptive possibility, drawing on Wister's experience of a summer spent on a Wyoming ranch in 1895. This edition includes Wister's neglected essay, 'The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher' (1895), a revealing companion to a novel that has disturbing undercurrents.

• New

  Paperback
  1992

  $31.11

  Although the origins of the western are as old as colonial westward expansion, it was Owen Wister's novel The Virginian, published in 1902, that established most of the now-familiar conventions of the genre. On the heels of the classic western's centennial, this collection of essays both re-examines the text of The Virginian and uses Wister's novel as a lens for studying what the next century of western writing and reading will bring. The contributors address Wister's life and travels, the novel's influence on and handling of gender and race issues, and its illustrations and various retellings on stage, film, and television as points of departure for speculations about the new West -as indeed Wister himself does at the end of the novel. The contributors reconsider the novel's textual complexity and investigate The Virginian's role in American literary and cultural history. Together their essays represent a new western literary studies, comparable to the new western history. Melody Graulich is a professor of English at Utah State University and the editor of Western American Literature.Stephen Tatum teaches in the Department of English at the University of Utah and is the author of Inventing Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881-1981 and Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses: A Reader's Guide.