Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jeffrey J. Folks

Critical Essay by Jeffrey J. Folks

SOURCE: Folks, Jeffrey J. “Richard Ford's Postmodern Cowboys.” In Perspectives on Richard Ford, edited by Huey Guagliardo, pp. 141-56. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

In the following essay, Folks argues that although Ford draws upon the recognizable figure of the drifter or outlaw, he is able to undercut the western myth by setting stories in different geographical locations and addressing non-localized American social and economic issues, which results in postmodern westerns with postmodern cowboys.

Richard Ford approached the mythology and literary conventions of western fiction from the perspective of a native southerner who has spent most of his life in the South and the East, and, following the publication of Rock Springs and Wildlife, he has not returned to the western subject. As Russell Martin puts it, in explaining Ford's absence from his 1992 anthology of contemporary western writing, Ford is among those “writers with strong connections to this...
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