About this volume / William Brannon -- On Southwestern literature / William Brannon -- The polychotomous Southwest / Mark Busby -- Understanding Southwestern literature : critical approaches and major works / William Brannon -- Chicana "feminist architecture" in the works of Sandra Cisneros / T. Jackie Cuevas -- Writing (and righting) the desert Southwest : literary legacies and the restoration of Glen Canyon / Laura Smith -- The Indian captivity narrative : a genre of the Southwest / Randi Lynn Tanglen -- "Balances and harmonies always shifting" : an ecopostcolonial borderlands reading of Silko's Ceremony / Wilma Shires -- Mapping the territory : Mexican American memoir / Paul Guajardo -- Resisting dominant national narratives : recovering María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Squatter and the Don and (re)writing Mexican American history / Annette Portillo -- Ecological martyrs : ecocritical considerations beside spiritual mestizaje in Ana Castillo's So Far from God / Mike Lemon -- Willa Cather and Southwestern aesthetics / John Samson -- Creative genius : Willa Cather's characters and the influence of the American desert Southwest / Max Despain -- Of judges and fairybook beasts : the male mentor and violence in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian / Maria O'Connell -- The haunted frontier : Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy / Cordelia E. Barrera -- Coming to terms with death in the west : anticipation of death and the effects of loss in the novels of Larry McMurtry / Roger Walton Jones -- Additional works of Southwestern literature.