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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... postwar years has dissolved into a period of cultural confusion and volatility - a time that offers, along with doubt and dismay, at least the hope of reframing our basic goals and values so that they will be more fruitful for us as ...
... . If there are significant parallels between the portrait of postwar America drawn by novelists and social scientists, so too are there parallels between novelistic and social-scientific readings of the institutional causes.
... postwar years. More significantly, this suggests that hardcover bestselling novels were not a fundamentally different entity in 1975 than in 1945, and thus that their content was relatively congruent with the attitudes and beliefs of ...
... postwar years a few large companies had captured much of the market for popular fiction. Even though the hardcover bestseller lists show great continuity during this period, mainstream publishing did undergo striking changes between ...
... postwar period of affluence and population growth. It ended in glutted markets and a series of mergers. Although these mergers failed to exert oligopolistic control over publishing, they enabled some houses to become bigger and more ...
Inhalt
from entrepreneurial adventure | |
the varieties of selffulfillment | |
the failure of success | |
The social critics | |
Conclusion | |
Notes | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |