Through all its transformations and reinventions over the past century, "Sin City" has consistently been regarded by artists and cultural critics as expressing in purest form, for better or worse, an aesthetic and social order spawned by neon signs and institutionalized indulgence. In other words, Las Vegas provides a codex with which to confront the problems of the West and to track the people, materials, ideas, and virtual images that constitute postregional space. Morta Las Vegas considers Las Vegas and the problem of regional identity in the American West through a case study of a single episode of the television crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Delving deep into the interwoven events of the episode titled "4 x 4," but resisting a linear, logical case-study approach, the authors draw connections between the city-a layered and complex world-and the violent, uncanny mysteries of a crime scene. Morta Las Vegas reveals nuanced issues characterizing the emergence of a postregional West, moving back and forth between a geographical and a procedural site and into a place both in between and beyond Western identity.

Although the origins of the western are as old as colonial westward expansion, it was Owen Wister's novel "The Virginian," published in 1902, that established most of the now-familiar conventions of the genre. On the heels of the classic western's centennial, this collection of essays both re-examines the text of The Virginian and uses Wister's novel as a lens for studying what the next century of western writing and reading will bring. The contributors address Wister's life and travels, the novel's influence on and handling of gender and race issues, and its illustrations and various retellings on stage, film, and television as points of departure for speculations about the "new West"--as indeed Wister himself does at the end of the novel. The contributors reconsider the novel's textual complexity and investigate "The Virginian's" role in American literary and cultural history. Together their essays represent a new western literary studies, comparable to the new western history.

For most people, the work of Frederic Remington conjures an antiquarian world of all things "western." Why this is so, and whether it "should" be so, are two of the critical questions raised in this book. Stephen Tatum closely considers selected paintings from Remington's last four years of life--his so-called years of critical acclaim. Tatum's purpose is twofold: first, to understand these paintings, both formally and thematically, within their historical, aesthetic, and biographical contexts; and second, to account for what endows them today--after marking the centennial of Remington's death in 1909--with continuing aesthetic and cultural significance. To this end, Tatum examines these late paintings in relation to Remington's other works, his letters and published writings, his evolving critical reception, and the writing and artwork of other cultural figures of the era, such as historian Frederick Jackson Turner and sociologist Georg Simmel. The book provides an illuminating glimpse of how and why particular Remington works might seize a viewer's attention in his or her past or present moment of reception--how in fact their unstable visual complexity can ultimately absorb their viewer. In his "Coda," Tatum offers a personal memoir of his own encounter with Remington's "The Love Call," a critical meditation enacting and questioning the "Remington Moment."