The Presidents of American Fiction
eBook - ePub

The Presidents of American Fiction

Fashioning the U.S. Political Imagination

  1. 224 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Presidents of American Fiction

Fashioning the U.S. Political Imagination

About this book

The Presidents of American Fiction brings together American literature, history, and political science to explore the most influential fictionalized accounts of the presidency from the early 19th century to the time of Trump. Of late, popular understandings of the presidency are being radically re-written-consider, for example, the distinctive myths that accompanied the ascent of the Obama and Trump administrations-and many readers of all stripes are radically reimagining the office and its holder. Placing these changes within a broader cultural context, Michael J. Blouin investigates narratives involving fictional presidents, from the supposedly factual to the outright fantastical, within their distinct literary and historical moments. The author considers representative texts including works penned by James Fenimore Cooper from the Jacksonian moment, Gore Vidal in the age of Nixon and Vietnam, and Philip Roth in the neoliberal period. Through detailed readings that question how American presidents function as characters within the popular imagination, this book examines the presidency as a complex, ever-evolving trope, and in so doing enhances our appreciation of American literature's inextricable link with American politics.

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Yes, you can access The Presidents of American Fiction by Michael J. Blouin in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Modern Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-Title
  3. Dedication
  4. Title
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction: Moving Portraits of the President
  8. 1 James Fenimore Cooper’s Exceptional Presidents
  9. 2 George Lippard and the Gothic President
  10. 3 William Wells Brown and the Disembodied President
  11. 4 The President in Books for Boys
  12. 5 The President in Books for Girls
  13. 6 Hamlin Garland, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Tortured Heart of American Realism
  14. 7 Gore Vidal and the Performative Presidency
  15. 8 The Imperial Presidents of American Literature
  16. Epilogue: George Saunders and Presidential Melancholia
  17. References
  18. Index
  19. Copyright