This volume offers new critical insights into the increasingly mythological figure of the American cowboy and “The West” in the 21st century while seeking to explain how these components of American identity continue to fit into our shared culture narrative.

Contemporary Cowboys: Reimagining an American Archetype in Popular Culture expands and develops an understanding of recent cultural shifts in representations of the American cowboy and “the West” as vital components of American identity and values. The chapters in this book examine they ways in which twenty-first century representations have updated the figure of the cowboy, considering not only traditionally analyzed sources, such as television, film, and literature, but also less studied areas such as comics, and music. The contributors probe the cowboy archetype and western mythology with critical theory, feminist critiques, philosophy, history, cultural analysis, and more.

Chapter 1: The Gaucho in a Globalized World

Adam Barkman & Enzo Guerra

Chapter 2.: The Philosophy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Judge Holden and

Heraclitus

Jerold J. Abrams

Chapter 3: Horse Sense: Discerning a Dialectic of Human Relations from Buck

and The Rider”

Jennifer L. McMahon

Chapter 4: Should’ve Been a Cowboy’: Changing Yet Stable Representations of the

Cowboy in Modern American Country Music

Gillian Kelly

Chapter 5: Can You Hear Me? Springsteen’s ‘Outlaw Pete’ as American ‘Hero

Lilian Haney and John Thompson

Chapter 6: “I Can’t Go Back”: The Re-imagination of Space in Feminist Westerns

Karen Adkins

Chapter 7: They Forgot to Put in the Quit’: Representations of Whiteness and

Foundation Myths in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”

Misty L. Jameson

Chapter 8. Slow Cowboys and New Men: Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and

First Cow

Wendy Chapman Peek

Chapter 9. Rewriting the Western Myth: Marcia Muller’s Private Eye on California

Cindy Hamilton

Chapter 10. The Lone Wolf and the Wild West: How Private Eyes Became the New Cowboys”

Dahlia Schweitzer

Chapter 11. Disarming the Lone Cowboy: A Return to an Authentic West in The Wild

Bunch and Deadwood”

Mark Walling

Chapter 12. Semiotic Landscapes and Fallen Heroes: Repurposing the Myth of the West in Westworld

Caroline Collins

Chapter 13.Graphic Evolutions: Imagining the Cowboy-as-Archetype in Contemporary Comics

Clint Jones