Indigo Recker

Defense Date

6-8-2023

Graduation Date

Summer 8-5-2023

Availability

One-year Embargo

Submission Type

dissertation

Degree Name

PhD

Department

English

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Committee Chair

Greg Barnhisel

Committee Member

Tom Kinnahan

Committee Member

Erin Smith

Keywords

reception studies, cultural studies, reader response, westerns, western american literature, popular culture, genre fiction, far right extremism, politics and culture, settler colonialism

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes mass-produced western novels and their readers from the years 1970 to 1999. At the end of the twentieth century, when mass market western novels were sold at a rate indicating consistent readerships, the US was seeing a rise in far-right politics with events like the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, the 1993 WACO siege, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. This readership, and these political movements, are the focus of this dissertation, exploring how readers situated themselves into political discourse, how political meanings embedded in mass-market fiction aligned with racial, class, gender, and regional identities in contemporary US culture and whether the consumption of these meanings shaped the political self-conceptions of readers.

I use a mixed-method approach beginning with a corpus analysis of seventy-five western novels analyzing what meanings were encoded in them, and how these meanings functioned ideologically. I then trace these ideological contours onto the political landscape of the far right in this period, analyzing key primary documents using western-coded discourses around race, gender, and settler colonial structures to articulate grievances and frame violence as an answer to perceived problems. In the last chapters, I explore how readers encountered and interacted with the ideological content in the western genre and where these encounters overlapped with the far right. Readers used identity as a lens to connect to a way of life that was inaccessible in their modern experiences. The 1980’s to 1990’s marked an important moment for the western reader, often feeling anxiety around the evolving genre and interpreted this as a threat to their identities. I argue readers with the most investment in systems of power were the most susceptible to an oppositional decoding position that overlapped with far-right politics. These readers had the most to lose and saw far-right groups acknowledging and reciprocating their felt grievances. Extreme politics explained what these readers saw happening, who was to blame, and offered solutions to protect what they were losing. This dissertation places texts alongside both readers and political contexts demonstrating prescience within the field of cultural reception studies at the intersection of literature and politics.

Language

English

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