Karoline Aksnes

The Virginian's Cultural Clashes: a Study of Cultural Representation in Owen Wister's Novel the Virginian Karoline Aksnes

Cultural clashes between East and West constitute a fundamental trait in any formula Western. The Virginian?s Cultural Clashes goes back to the genre?s beginning, studying this phenomenon as it is represented in the foundational text of the Western genre, Owen Wister?s The Virginian from 1902. Through the perspective of literary transculturation, this work focuses on the ways in which cultural encounter is staged and acted out in Wister?s novel. As The Virginian presents neither the East nor the West as static, but, rather, as in transition, undergoing transformative change, the journey of personal transformation we see in each character, as well as in the Western environment they live in, is a central part of the discussion. Can Wister?s transcultural West help us understand how the mythic, idealized and iconic West of formula fiction came to be?