"True Grit" by Charles Portis is a western novel that is genuinely subversive the more-and-more you think about it. On the one hand, clearly in love with the genre, it doesn’t shrink from critiquing that genre, either, through the eyes of its strong female protagonist.
It isn't parody per se, but by making the POV character Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl, we see the classic American western setting and the people who inhabit it in a novel way. In more ways than one, Mattie, not a typical girl of her age, typifies some of the core character traits we come to expect from westerns. Traits like courage, self-reliance, practicality, perseverance—aka grit, and I'd argue she demonstrates these qualities more so than even her allies, the U.S. Marshall and a Texas Ranger. Both of those characters are who you'd expect to be the exemplars of the genre, but interestingly, both are clearly subordinate to Mattie herself.
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