![]() ![]() ![]() Kollin highlights the need to “work against a narrowly conceived regionalism” in order to “understand the region not as a closed or bounded space but as a continually changing and evolving entity in both content and form” (“Postwestern Studies” xi). As Stephen Tatum puts it, “places or regions need to be regarded not only as geopolitical and geological territories or physical landscapes, but also as sites produced by the circulation of peoples, of technologies and commodities, and of cultural artifacts, including of course images, stories, and myths” (“Postfrontier Horizons” 461–62). In this sense, it is fundamental to mention the relatively recent “postregional” (Tatum, “Spectrality” 12) turn toward “critical regionalism” represented by critics like Kollin, Campbell, or Tatum, who have incorporated this concept (with origins in an architectural term coined by Lefaivre and Tzonis, later developed by Kenneth Frampton in 1983) to Western studies. Of course the root of the word is essential: what exactly do we mean by “Western”? Most film studies scholars systematically seem to address Westerns as a genre, whereas historians and literary critics seem to consider them from a regional rather than a generic point of view. Essman (“Manifest Landscape/Latent Ideology,” 2000), Tomislav Čegir (“Post-western,” 2002), Susan Kollin (Postwestern Cultures, 2007), Krista Comer (“New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest,” 2011), or Neil Campbell (“Post-Western Cinema,” 2011 Post-Westerns, 2013) have applied it successfully to the field of Western studies, although they do not necessarily seem to agree on its features or on the films or books that could be included in the category. Cawelti (The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, 1999), Diane M. Writers such as Richard Slotkin (Gunfighter Nation, 1992), Kerwin Lee Klein (“Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word,” 1996), Frieda Knobloch (The Culture of Wilderness, 1996), Virginia Scharff, (“Mobility, Women, and the West,” 1999), John G. The term post-Western was first applied to cinema by Philip French in the 1970s (Westerns, 1973) and has been employed by a variety of critics since then to refer to very different books and films. It has simply changed shape, colour and compass point. The western, it transpires, has not died out.
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