Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the Contemporary Western

O n ene of the more interesting aspects of the Western is the way southerners have figured centrally in the genre's development. Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian, for instance, is widely credited with introducing Americans to the cult of the cowboy in a story that features a transplanted southerner who joins forces with a group of powerful Wyoming cattle ranchers in order to make the West safe for frontier capitalism. Philip French long ago attempted to account for the genre's interest in the southerner, pointing out that a large part of the new itinerant labor force in the post-Civil War West was made up of former Confederate soldiers. For French, this development partly explains why the dispossessed Southerner has come to figure so prominently as the model for the chivalrous cowboy (94). More recently, Peter Stanfield has traced the southern origins of another western icon, the singing cowboy. Emerging out of the Dixie medicine shows of the 1930s and 1940s, the singing cowboy served an important function in American culture, ridding southern vernacular music of its racial connotations in order to