Choice Review

Westerns, whether film or novel, are a neglected field for academic examination, and Loaded Fictions is a welcome addition to the field. Emmert (Univ. of Miami) focuses on films--and some novels--that bend the genre's formula-driven past toward serious critiques of politics, violence, gender, and race. Using cultural-theory approaches, the author finds all kinds of meaning--tending toward the critique of dominant ideologies--in the Western. Thus, he fills a niche in the academic study of the genre. Nevertheless, this book does not open many stimulating new approaches to Westerns and does not quite join the ranks of the "big" groundbreakers, such as John Cawelti's The Six-Gun Mystique (1971), Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (CH, May'93), and Jane Tompkins's West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Ch, Nov'92). However, academic libraries with extensive holdings in popular culture and modern American film and fiction should add this volume, which will be useful to upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Q. Grigg; Hamline University