Last Western

Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of shows in HBO's recent history, Deadwood has surprisingly little coverage in our current scholarship. Grounding contemporary anxieties about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in its nineteenth-century setting, Deadwood revises our understanding of a formative period for the American nation through a re-examination of one of the main genres through which this national story has been transmitted: the Western. With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America.

The Last Western is laudable in its efforts to draw attention to Deadwood and its role in what has at times been called a new era of television. There are readings in this anthology which should be of interest for anyone working on Deadwood or television studies., Scholars and students interested in Deadwood and HBO will find much that is useful, as will scholars interested in how television drama can articulate anxieties and concerns about contemporary issues via historical or generic forms. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, undergraduate students, graduate students, and research faculty., The collections handily meet the challenge that vexes much writing about film, an ephemeral genre in which retelling can overshadow reflection. One way the various essayists accomplish this is by recalling powerful scenes from Deadwood that form indelible tableaus … These essayists represent perspectives not only from literary studies but from political science, film studies, and history., Anchored by the editors' incisive introduction, this timely volume goes a long way to redress the dearth of scholarship on one of the richest television dramas in recent years. One of the book's particular strengths--rare for an anthology of this nature--is its focus; from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the contributors plumb the intersection of Deadwood's visual style, its treatment of genre, and its exploration of political economy at the formation and waning of the American empire. Several of the chapters will be required reading for my course on contemporary American television., This wonderfully thought-provoking book invites the reader to “Go West!” And here, the journey West is also a journey in -- into the heart of the anxieties and desires that continue to shape contemporary experiences of American Empire.

Jennifer Greiman is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, US. She is the author of Democracy's Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (Fordham 2010), as well as essays on Gustave de Beaumont, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. Paul Stasi is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, US. He is the author of Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense (2012), as well as essays on T.S. Eliot, Richard Flannagan, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Jean Toomer.