{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02495201535508637, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005758157389635317, 'mean_word_length': 5.318181818181818, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Old West, New West, Postwest, Real West

of the Nineteenth Century United States By Stephanie LeMenager University of Nebraska Press, 2004 When western American literature first showed up in eastern periodicals, it offered itself as a different kind of writing from the national norm. Similarly, students of western literature have usually been out of step with the rest of literary academia; like much of the literature they study, a kind of jaunty impertinence-simultaneously grandiose and defensive-has marked their work from the beginning. In the decades when the field emerged, the overwhelming popularity of formula westerns in print and on screen made it marginal to the study of high art. Myth study gave popular materials enough legitimacy for westernists to claim that their field deserved serious consideration, but by 1987, when the Western Literature Association brought out its Literary History of the American West (LHAW), the academic market in criticism had moved elsewhere. The preface to LHAW stated, somewhat anachronistically, that though academic appreciation of western American literature is "handicapped by association with Hollywood horse operas and stereotypical paperbacks sold in bus stations," nevertheless, the literature "includes a large body of first-rate literary art" (xvi). "First-rate literary art"-how quaint that phrase sounds now. The editors emphasized the serious ambitions of much western writing and argued for its importance to US writing as a whole. But all authors considered at length in this tome of over 1,330 pages were Anglos, and only four were women-Mary Austin for the Far West, Katherine Anne Porter for the Southwest, and Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz for the Midwest. Most essays on individual authors appeared in sections devoted to western subregions: Far West, Southwest, Midwest, and Rocky Mountains. This structure seemingly tied literary production to regional particulars, establishing western literature as a regional product rather than a national one. The editorial rationale behind this division was that-in another