Western romance literature
[2] The genre originated in the 1800s, popularised by the works of Bret Harte,[3] Zane Grey[4] and Catharine Sedgwick[1] who wrote love stories about cowboys and their heroines, and often their conflict with Native Americans.
[2] These stories typically follow the romance of a cowboy, ranch hand or bull rider and his heroine, contrasting the fragility of love with the severity of the harsh landscape.
It celebrated romance on the American frontier and oscillated, (as is characteristic of the genre) between the beauty of a woman's love and the treachery and violence of the landscape.
[10] Grey became known for his work in this genre (under the publisher, Harper's) and the hugely successful Western Romantic novel Riders of the Purple Sage (1912).
The novel centres around a cowboy named Lassister and his relationship with his virginal heroine, Jane, set against the backdrop of the severe American frontier.
According to Danney Goble, it was “Grey's combination of brutal violence and saccharine romance - a heady mixture all but unknown to his predecessors in the writing of frontier fiction – [that] established his claim to a gold mine which he exploited time and again”.
[4] Many critics suggest Grey's romances offered a vision of hope in America, the triumph of good over evil, the unity of the cowboy and his heroine and the prevailing of traditional values in world rocked by war and social upheaval.
[4] James Fenimore Cooper was another influential writer of Western romance fiction in the 19th century as was Bret Harte, both having become known for furthering the myth of the idealised cowboy in Romantic literature.
[13] The Last of the Mohicans created the framework for Western romance literature from then on, establishing tropes like the ‘captive heroine’, adhering to ideologies of 19th century America that praised progress and reflected a changing relationship with Native Americans.
In the case of Dances with Wolves, many critics noted that the American Indians were portrayed as multi-dimensional characters, imbued with audience's sympathy and worked to demystify the white depiction of Western expansion.
Sedgwick's novels both adhered to conventions of Romantic literature and the marriage plot yet offered unconventional portrayals of women and American Indians, through a non-racist, lens.
[15] According to Goble, Zane Grey's heroines tended to differ from the typical portrayal of a love interest in the 20th century, namely lacking the autonomy women of this time were gaining.
[4] His heroine, Patricia Edgerton of The Deer Stalker (1925) rejected modernity and the ‘New Woman’ in her dress and attitudes, forgoing styles that had become popular at the turn of the century, such as short hair and smoking.
[2] Western romance as a genre flourished within the structure of the pulp fiction novel, generally written simply for easy reading.
[5] Mills and Boon romances generally emphasise the heroine's journey, her fears, motivations and aspirations and are typically written from a female perspective.
Canadian and Australian rural romance literature has also become increasingly popular, paralleling the American frontier and adhering to the same tropes and imagery.
In films such as Brokeback Mountain, the unconventional same sex love plot contrasts the severity of the American West and conservative society in 1950s America.
