Book Review: Reading The Virginian in the New West

The Virginian is here to stay. For most of the first century of its life, critics gave their attention to what they found on the novel\u27s face: the rugged hero, conquest, a reinvigorated national identity, the triumph of patriarchal law and of good over evil. It was a tale out of Turner. This timely new volume confirms and elaborates recent, revisionist moves to overturn the consensus reading and replace it with interrogations of the novel\u27s competing, even contradictory perspectives in matters of race, class, and gender. Once the embodiment of a faith in the American character and mission, The Virginian commences its second century as a complex expression of how our errand into the wilderness has gone astray