Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian is the key to understanding the genre of American Western literature. Everything prior to it wasn’t truly “the Western” yet, and everything since draws on it, refers to it, was shaped by it, or defines itself against it. In this unit, we’ve read some “pre-Virginian” literature, and we’ll read some “post-Virginian” literature, but you need to understand the Virginian (and Wister) in order to make sense of both what comes before and after.
Hence: we’re going to crowdsource our knowledge about the novel. In our class there’s a range of understandings, approaches, and levels of engagement with the text. In other words, some of you read it and “got it,” some of you read it and didn’t “get it” and some of you didn’t read it at all. Pooling our collective knowledge seems a worthwhile approach.
I’ve created a wiki for the Virginian, which is a website that anyone can edit. This will help us be most efficient in creating a class study guide to the novel and in formulating discussion and exam questions about it.
