Greetings, readers! Now that Amazon has disabled its popular ebook lending feature, we're more committed than ever to helping you find the best ways to borrow FREE or save big on the Kindle books that you want to read. Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Prime Reading offer members free reading access to over 1 million titles, including Kindle books, magazines, and audiobooks. Beginning soon, each day in this space we will feature "Today's FREEbies and Top Deals for Our Favorite Readers" to share top 5-star titles that are available for KU and Prime members to read FREE, plus a link to a 30-day FREE trial for Kindle Unlimited!

Lendle

Lendle is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associates participant, we earn small amounts from qualifying purchases on the Amazon sites.

This is the first volume of a planned three part study of Robert B. Parker’s western novels. The first part begins with a brief introduction, establishing the strong thematic connection between Parker’s first western, Gunman’s Rhapsody (a relatively accurate historical novel on the legend of Wyatt Earp), and the four western novels which comprise the Cole and Hitch series that followed. The relation between Gunman’s Rhapsody and the Cole and Hitch series consists rather obviously in Parker’s decision to characterize the classic American hero as a “man with a gun,” conspicuously stoic in demeanor. The connection between the historical western and the later series is solidified even further in Parker’s distinctive mythological view of the American west of the literary imagination. After making and delineating these connections, the remainder of the first volume is dedicated to an interpretation of the first two novels in the Cole and Hitch series, Appaloosa and Resolution. The second part will address the last two novels of the series, Brimstone and Blue-Eyed Devil. The third and final part of the study will return to Gunman’s Rhapsody. Because of the historical origin and grounding of Parker’s mythological view of the western, I interpret Parker’s first western novel as the most important. Considering Gunman’s Rhapsody the essential key to understanding Parker’s westerns as a whole, then, comparatively more time will be given to it. In the course of going into more detail in the interpretation of Gunman’s Rhapsody, the philosophical and mythological meaning of Wyatt Earp will be examined, and it will be argued that the famed gunman of history and legend was deliberately chosen by Parker as the best example of the stoic western hero.Chris Dacus has previously published essays of philosophical and literary criticism in The Cormac McCarthy Journal ("The West as Symbol of the Eschaton in Cormac McCarthy") and Southwestern American Literature ("Borderline Insanity: Modernity as a Political Problem in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian").

Genres for this book