Awards

• Winner of Finalist for the ForeWord Magazine 2009 Book of the Year Award in the Popular Culture Category.

Overview

He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western explores the construction and representation of masculinity in low-budget western movies made from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These films contained some of the mid-twentieth-century's most familiar names, especially for youngsters: cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Red Ryder. The first serious study of a body of films that was central to the youth of two generations, He Was Some Kind of a Man combines the author's childhood fascination with this genre with an interdisciplinary scholarly exploration of the films influence on modern views of masculinity. McGillis argues that the masculinity offered by these films is less one-dimensional than it is plural, perhaps contrary to expectations. Their deeply conservative values are edged with transgressive desire, and they construct a male figure who does not fit into binary categories, such as insider/outsider or masculine/feminine. Particularly relevant is the author's discussion of George W. Bush as a cowboy and how his aspirations to cowboy ideals continue to shape American policy. This engagingly written book will appeal to the general reader interested in film, westerns, and contemporary culture as well as to scholars in film studies, gender studies, children's literature, and auto/biography.

Full Product Details

9781554580590

Table of Contents

Reviews

McGillis' love of the cowboy film, indeed the overwhelming importance of the genre for his childhood identity, is evident throughout the book, which is full of personal anecdotes and nostalgic recollections...He is most effective when discussing masculinity and boyhood and he analyses costume in the B Western well. Paul Sutton (Roehampton University), Times Higher Education, 19 November 2009 'A fascinating study of part of the wider genre that wise pardners would be quick to get out of the saddle and check out. Yee-haw.' -- Screentrade Feb 2010

McGillis' love of the cowboy film, indeed the overwhelming importance of the genre for his childhood identity, is evident throughout the book, which is full of personal anecdotes and nostalgic recollections...He is most effective when discussing masculinity and boyhood and he analyses costume in the B Western well. Paul Sutton (Roehampton University), Times Higher Education, 19 November 2009

Author Information

Roderick McGillis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of the award-winning The Nimble Reader (1996), A Little Princess: Gender and Empire (1996), and Les Pieds Devant (2007), and the editor of George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs (2007). He is a former editor of The Children's Literature Association Quarterly, and former president of the Children's Literature Association.

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