The American Dream and the Popular NovelRoutledge, 23.10.2017 - 256 Seiten This title, originally published in 1985, examines conceptions of success and the good life expressed in bestselling novels – ranging from historical sagas and spy thrillers to more serious works by Updike, Bellows, Steinbeck and Mailer – published from 1945 to 1975. Using these popular books as cultural evidence, Elizabeth Long argues that the meaning of the American dream has changed dramatically, but in a more complex fashion than has been recognised by that country’s most prominent social critics. Her study presents a challenge to prevailing social-scientific views of contemporary American culture, and represents, both in theory and method, an important contribution to the study of culture and social criticism. |
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... discussion, and their meaning for both the nation and its people has been at issue. From the time of the Korean War - when American troops and especially prisoners appeared demoralized - through the late 1950s, pundits and politicians ...
... discuss their heroes' and heroines' inner lives, family backgrounds, motivations, hopes and dreams, beliefs and actions, and the personal, moral, and social consequences of those actions. They show their characters developing over time ...
... discussion. Each of these thinkers lays claim to different territory. Riesman, for example, speaks of social ... discuss in Chapter 6, provides an important counterpoint to novelistic perspectives on success. Social thinkers, like ...
... discuss in more detail, they treat cultural evidence rather casually, making an idiosyncratic choice of examples from literature and other kinds of popular culture to illustrate what they have already concluded to be the significant ...
... discussing the evidence from the novels, I analyze the social critics' 'maps' of the same terrain as cultural artifacts, showing the ways in which the cultural developments recorded in popular novels permeate the work of these thinkers ...
Inhalt
from entrepreneurial adventure | |
the varieties of selffulfillment | |
the failure of success | |
The social critics | |
Conclusion | |
Notes | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |