Introduction : the West, storytelling animals, and the hunt as performance -- Act 1: Actors and agents : the cultural ecology of hunter's paradise. Masculinity, the 'strenuous life', and the genealogy of the hunter hero -- The voice of the Winchester and the martial culture of the hunt -- Lady adventurers and crack shots : hunter heroines in the nineteenth-century American West -- Act 2:'The after life' of the hunt : story, image and trophy. Landscapes of testimony : performing the game trail in literature, art, and photography -- Staging the game trail : the theatrical wild -- The soul in the skin : taxidermy and the reanimated -- Act 3: Saving the hunting frontier . Conservation, wild things, and the end of the hunting trail -- Heretical visions and hunter's paradise redux -- Preservation and performance : an afterword to the after-life.
Summary:
"Stories of grand adventure and hunting loomed large in the material and the imagined landscape of the nineteenth-century West. Jones explores social, political, economic, and environmental dynamics of hunting using performance as trail guide and production of a '"cultural ecology of the chase"' in art and taxidermy"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.