Big Empty: Essays on the Land as Narrative Book

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: Western Landscape As Narrative
Pt. 1	Landscape In History, Photography, Art and Folklore
1	Dreaming the Pass: The Western Imagination and the Landscape of South Pass	7
2	Haunted by Rhyolite: Learning from the Landscape of Failure	27
3	Landscapes, Indians, and Photography in the Age of Scientific Exploration	49
4	Image and Counterimage: The Regional Artist and the Great Plains Landscape	75
5	Shaping and Being Shaped by the Land: The Western Landscape in Oral Narrative	93
Pt. 2	Landscape in Fiction and Film
6	Claiming Female Space: Mary Austin's Western Landscape	119
7	Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the Withdrawal of Landscape	133
8	Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping: A Landscape of Discontent	147
9	The American Eden: Regained and Lost Again in Angel and the Badman and Witness	165
10	Sermons in Stone: Monument Valley in The Searchers	187
11	An Estranged Frontier: Landscape in Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller	207
12	Freedom, Entrapment, and "Playing the String Out To the End": Imagery of Space and Enclosure in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch	225
13	Cactus Eden: Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue	241
Pt. 3	Some Theoretical Considerations: The Relationship Between Language and Landscape
14	John Ford's Stagecoach and the Mythic Space of the Western Movie	261
15	Landscape: The Language of the Western	283
16	Landscape: The Perceiver and the Coursing of Human Events	303
	Contributors	319