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This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.

This epilogue summarizes the reasons why treacherous hospitality is everywhere in Western literature. It explains what happens to the rituals of hospitality, including the worst that hosts and guests can do to each other, and also presents examples in Western literature which show that even the best of hospitable intentions may go awry.

The Confessions are one of Western literature's classics and one of Augustine's best known works. Here, Augustine provides a description about how he was converted to Christianity in AD 386. Even though these may have been written ten years after his conversion, the first nine Books describe some of the spectacles that were utilized when viewing various dramatic events. As such, several general books about Augustine usually refer to the Confessions when tracing his biography and to determine his way of thinking. This book, however, veers away from using these as a determining source as these can be misleading. In the Confessions, we see Augustine's version of his life after his conversion, a commentary on Genesis, and the six ways of creation. This book attempts to examine the cultural context that determined Augustine's thought and life. In this chapter, the focus is more on looking into the philosophical context of his life and works.

This chapter introduces the concept of Hell and the ‘katabatic imagination’, which is a worldview that conceives of selfhood as the narrative construct of an infernal journey and return. It identifies Dante Alighieri as the most influential katabatic writer on contemporary Western literature, and looks at the development of the katabatic narrative from the classical period to modern times. Several descent narratives are presented in the final section of the chapter.

Chapter 4 argues that Indigenous story traditions are a crucial, overlooked context for understanding nineteenth-century American literature about “the West.” This chapter analyzes Pawnee and Osage narratives alongside Washington Irving’s Tour on the Prairies (1835) to demonstrate white authorial disorientation in the face of Indigenous storied space. Pawnee and Osage representations of journeys, crossings, and encounters along the network of trails that crossed the great plains guided these communities throughout the trying periods of US invasion and removal during the nineteenth century. The bodily discomfort and aesthetic disorientation depicted in Irving’s Tour on the Prairies is a result of his inability to connect with long-standing Indigenous movements and temporalities in this space. Similarly, scholarly misreading and neglect of this text is a product of a limited critical approach restricted to a singular authorial aesthetic. James Fenimore Cooper’s and Edwin James’s accounts of unsettling proximity to Native aesthetics close this chapter to suggest broader patterns of authorial disorientation.

This chapter gives a close rereading of Nakagami's most well-known work, the Akiyuki trilogy: “Misaki,” Kareki nada, and Chi no hate shijō no toki. It particularly focuses on Nakagami's depiction of the voice of a transgressive man who is oppressed by the fragmentation of the relationship between him and his family and also his subaltern (Burakumin) community during the dismantlement of the Kumano Burakumin homeland. Particular attention is paid to how Nakagami's theory of monogatari (narrative) operates to depict the voice of the Kasuga Burakumin. Of particular importance is the third novel in the trilogy, Chi no hate shijō no toki. Although this chapter provides an overview of “Misaki,” and Kareki nada, the focus of the textual analysis is on how Nakagami, a writer who consciously chose to “become a Burakumin,” represents the Burakumin voice in Chi no hate shijō no toki. It also discusses the Akiyuki trilogy as an example of Nakagami's unique writing practice that derived from overlaying the modern Japanese Western-influenced naturalist literature mode with the more traditional Japanese narrative mode.

Gangsta rap is a subgenre known for its subversive lyrics. Since emerging from hip-hop in southern California in the late 1980s with the work of Ice-T and N.W.A, it has found a foothold in New York City with hard-hitting rappers Run-DMC and Kool G Rap. Gangsta rap enjoyed commercial success but also created moral panic with its depiction of the noirish intrigue of the inner-city criminal underworld. This chapter examines gangsta rap and places some of its most visible features alongside ancient and medieval heroic poetry, particularly Homer, Virgil, and Anglo-Saxon material. It demonstrates gangsta rap’s excesses as part of a larger sociocultural pattern with a long history by focusing on five themes that run through both gangsta rap and heroic poetry: feasting, raiding, treasure, misogyny, and fatalism. More specifically, the chapter illustrates gangsta rap’s significant continuities with the traditional canon of Western literature.