Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre

Michael K. Johnson

Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre
Format
Hardback
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Country
United States
Published
1 March 2023
Pages
288
ISBN
9781496233509

Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre

Michael K. Johnson

Looking across the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, its literature, film, television, comic books, and other media, we can see multiple examples of what Shelley S. Rees calls a "changeling western," what others have called "weird westerns," and what Michael K. Johnson refers to as "speculative westerns"-that is, hybrid western forms created by merging the western with one or more speculative genres or subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history.

Speculative Wests investigates both speculative westerns and other speculative texts that feature western settings. Just as "western" refers both to a genre and a region, Johnson's narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the "speculative Wests" that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Ireland's Deathless Divide (2020), the reimagined future Navajo nation of Rebecca Roanhorse's Sixth World series (2018-19), and the complex temporal and geographic borderlands of Alfredo Vea's time travel novel The Mexican Flyboy (2016). Focusing on literature, film, and television from 2016 to 2020, Speculative Wests creates new visions of the American West.

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