“What the Hell Is a Flowery Boundary Tree?” Gunslinger, All the Pretty Horses and the Postmodern Western

Abstract

What is the function of a map, and what role does mapping perform in a literary text? This essay interrogates the use of maps and mapping, the influence and impact of capital and the construction of nationhood, and considers what it means to be an American in Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses and Edward Dorn's Gunslinger. The argument links the project pursued in these two westerns to larger geopolitical issues, whilst fully addressing the specificity and difference of the texts and their individual forms, structures and contents. Postmodern geographical theory is applied to the two books to provide a new theory of the way that land and territory are employed in the western.