Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgments.- Note on Contributors.- List of Illustrations.- Part I: Introduction.- 1 Imagining The West (Nicolas S. Witschi).- Part II: Regions and Histories.- 2 Exploration, Trading, Trapping, Travel, and Early Fiction, 1780-1850 (Edward Watts).- 3 Worlds of Wonder and Ambition: Gold Rush California and the Culture of Mining Bonanzas in the North American West (Peter Blodgett).- 4 The Literate West of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Tara Penry).- 5 A History of American Women's Western Books, 1833-1928 (Nina Baym).- 6 Literary Cultures of the American Southwest (Daniel Worden).- 7 Literary Cartography of the Great Plains (Susan Naremore Maher).- 8 The Literary Northern Rockies as The Last Best Place (O. Alan Weltzien).- 9 North by Northwest: The Last Frontier of Western Literature (Eric Heyne).- 10 Chronotopes of the Asian American West (Hsuan L. Hsu).- 11 African American Literature and Culture and the American West (Michael K. Johnson).- 12 Mythical Frontiers: Manifest Destiny, Aztlaan, and the Cosmic Race (John L. Escobedo).- 13 Native American Literature and Culture of the American West (Kathleen Washburn).- 14 Framing Class in the Rural West: Cowboys, Double-Wides and McMansions (Nancy Cook).- 15 Postcolonial West (Alex Hunt).- 16 New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest (Krista Comer).- Part III: Varieties and Forms.- 17 What We Talk about When We Talk about Western Art (Brian W. Dippie).- 18 "All Hat and No Cattle": Romance, Realism, and Late-19th-Century Western American Fiction (Gary Scharnhorst).- 19 The Coyote Nature of Cowboy Poetry (Barbara Barney Nelson).- 20 "The Wind Blew Them Away": Folksinging the West, 1880-1930 (David Fenimore).- 21 Autobiography (Gioia Woods).- 22 Housing the American West: Western Women's Literature, Early Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cathryn Halverson).- 23 The Apple Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree: Western American Literature and Environmental Literary Criticism (Hal Crimmel).- 24 Detective Fiction (Nicolas S. Witschi).- 25 The American Western Film (Corey Creekmur).- 26 Post-Western Cinema (Neil Campbell).- Part IV: Issues, Themes, Case Studies.- 27 America Unscripted: Performing the Wild West (Jefferson Slagle).- 28 Revising Public Memory in the American West: Native American Performance in the Ramona Outdoor Play (Karen E. Ramirez).- 29 Omnimedia Marketing: The Case of The Lone Ranger (Chadwick Allen).- 30 The Nuclear Southwest (Audrey Goodman).- 31 Ranging Over Stegner's Arid West: Mobility as Adaptive Strategy (Bonney MacDonald).- 32 The Global West: Temporality, Spatial Politics, and Literary Production (Susan Kollin).- 33 Tumbling Dice: The Problem of Las Vegas (Stephen Tatum and Nathaniel Lewis)