| As the American West enters an era of climate uncertainty due to anthropogenic climate change, this dissertation looks back to themost recentliterary century in which the seeds of climate change were sown. Examining a cross-section of western American fiction from the twentieth century, I propose that the depictions of water and aridity in these texts are intertwined with the metanarratives that have defined the West as a region and the literary genres and structures that authors have used to house their fictions. In other words, responses to water and aridity in individual literary fictions of the twentieth-century American West are at least partially constructed by how a text answers the question “What is the West?” Fictions that define the West as a garden or a frontier or an indigenous homeland draw from those definitions in their depictions of water and aridity and imagine a relationship with aridity and water that conforms to the region’s defining metanarrative. In addition, these definitionsof the West and corresponding depictions of water and aridity can be read through genre conventions and literary tropes that were popular during the past century. Ultimately, dry wests are constructed from the material reality of an arid West, the cultural narratives used to define the West, and the literary genres and structures within which narratives are housed. These variables lead to a variety of dry American Wests in twentieth-century fiction, with each West helping to explain the culture that has contributed to climate change while also suggesting revisions to cultural logics that might find America adapting and reducing climate change’s effects. Key Words: western American literature, material ecocriticism, water and the American West, American literature, aridity and literature, water in literature, deserts in literature, Westerns, American fiction, twentieth-century American fiction |