Landscapes of the New West

“Truly indispensable to scholars working with the literature of the American West, American studies, environmental theory, and feminist criticism.” — Western American Literature

“Comer has established the richness of an evolving Western literature that quarrels with and extends not only the legends bracketing the Marlboro Man and Clint Eastwood but also the regionalism of the earlier women writers.” — Women’s Review of Books

“Extensively explores the element of landscape — the single most unifying factor in all writing of the West — and specifically how landscape is presented by the female literary tradition.” — Library Journal

“Landscapes of the New West marks a major advance in connecting feminist thinking with Western regional thinking. Exploring the works of writers from Joan Didion to Sandra Cisneros, from Wanda Coleman to Mary Clearman Blew, Krista Comer thinks and analyzes with an extraordinary intensity and vigor. Under her attention, familiar assumptions about the West and its meanings are reconfigured into the sparkling elements of a new intellectual kaleidoscope. Especially in its reckoning with race and with dreams of the wilderness, this book makes you think, and think with freshness.” — Patricia Nelson Limerick, University of Colorado at Boulder

“This landmark book is a deft and gracefully written survey of the 'new female regionalism' in U.S. literary and cultural studies. Comer splendidly integrates urban geography, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and literary detail in a cross-cultural framework that neither fragments nor totalizes.” — José David Saldívar, University of California, Berkeley (or, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies)

“In a breathtakingly provocative and original study that forever de-mythologizes the masculinist west of Owen Wister and Wallace Stegner, Krista Comer makes a persuasive case that there is a new literary female regionalism and that the heart of this new regionalist sensibility is decidedly feminist and postmodern. By surveying writers like Joan Didion, Leslie Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Sandra Cisneros, Louis Erdrich, Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Freeman and others, Comer uncovers how these new female regionalists imaginatively relate to, construct, and narratively inhabit their many different western landscapes.” — Annette Kolodny, University of Arizona

“Krista Comer’s Landscapes of the New West offers inventive new readings of contemporary western women writers like Didion, Silko, Kingsolver, Anzaldua, and Kingston, readings grounded in interdisciplinary work on feminist geography, new western history, ecocriticism, environmental history, postcolonial studies, and postmodernism. Always politically engaged and risk-taking, Comer creates a new multi-ethnic literary landscape in the American West.” — Melody Graulich, editor, Western American Literature