Review of \u3ci\u3eRe-Imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art.\u3c/i\u3e By Richard W. Etulain

Retrospectives on the twentieth century are becoming more and more common the closer we get to this century\u27s close. The task of summing up an entire century\u27s worth of ideas and art is daunting, to say the least, and while many of the works that attempt the task fall short, Richard Etulain\u27s Re-Imagining the Modern American West manages to be comprehensive and inclusive, as well as fascinating. The book\u27s quality and scope are not surprising: Etulain, director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico, is well-known through his numerous studies of the American West in both literature and history. In his preface, Etulain promises an overview of the cultural and intellectual history of the twentieth-century West from a historian\u27s rather than a cultural anthropologist\u27s perspective. What follows is an engaging and extensive study of the general trends in the literature, history, and art of the twentieth-century American West. Some artists and historians from both traditional and marginalized groups-are covered individually and placed within a regional and historical context. In addition to his general overview, Etulain proposes some new and compelling theories about the region, its history, literature, and art