Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1994.  ISBN 0-8223-1469-X.  Trade soft cover, 223 pages including Notes and Index.  Very good; wraps show light edge and cover wear, binding tight; prior owner’s name inked at top of first page; remainder of interior clean and unmarked.  ‘For most North Americans – Canadians as well as Americans – the term “Western” evokes images of the frontier, brave sheriffs and ruthless outlaws, good cowboys and bad Indians.  As Arnold E. Davidson shows in this groundbreaking study, a number of Canada’s most interesting and experimental Western writers parody, reverse, or otherwise defuse the paraphernalia of the classic U.S. Western.  Lacking both a real and imagined frontier – Canadian settlers rode trains into the new territory, already policed by Mounties – the writers of Canadian Westerns were set a different task from their American counterparts and were subsequently freed to create some of the most complex and engrossing fiction yet produced in Canada.’ (from rear wrap)