The Cowboy As An American Hero-A Study Of The Popular Stereotype Figure In American Western Fictions

Cowboy has been established as the stereotypical hero in American popular culture, whose image bespeaks heroic spirits of the whole nation. This thesis, while making an attempt to outline the history of cowboy and development of cowboy fictions, focuses on the cowboy as a symbolic hero.The first chapter briefly goes through cowboy history as a consequence of beef industry and the decadence of this career alongside with further industrialization in the West. It is noteworthy that cowboy as an image calls the attention of literature when history of cowboys comes to an end.The second chapter outlines the literary development of cowboy fictions but does not stop at literary review. Cowboy fictions were regarded as equivalent of cheap fictions until the beginning of the twentieth century with Wister's The Virginian as the milestone. Well into the twentieth century, cowboy becomes a theme worthy of serious literary treatment, and finally, it becomes a national symbol.Chapter three deals specifically with the connotation of cowboy images set up by the literary texts. The cowboy as the hero in the textual world demonstrates the virtues of the bygone frontier life and at the same time stands out with their similarity with the European knights. Such a symbol soon sweeps over the land and fascinates the whole nation, with the image prone to provoke the reminiscence of the virgin land in the early time and even of the old Europe where new Americans have their root.Chapter four discusses about the narrative features of cowboy fiction. Virtually all cowboy fictions have tendentious narrators who make full use of the characters, the viewpoints, the voices and the backgrounds as means of establishment of the cowboy as the knight-errants of the West.However popular and significant this symbol might be, cowboy is not born with such status. Rather, it is not until the end of cowboy as a career in the historical West that American western fictions rescue it from a doom and revive it into a legendary hero.