When Shane was published in 1949, it was considered a very unusual western fiction novel. Unlike other books at the time, the book’s hero was the title character. Still more unusual was the fact that Shane himself was not a cold-blooded killer....

Reflecting back on Shane, life in the West was fairly isolated compared to the way that we live now when many people will pass by our houses throughout the day. during the late 1800s many people were moving west, but there were not highly...

Within any genre the individual gears and cogs of a film may vary in degrees, but the film still ascribes to a set of rules preordained by the genre’s progenitors. Like a meme, genre films such as the Western will warp and intentionally borrow...