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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... understanding of success from a sociological perspective raised questions of motivation, social structure, and the relation of achievement to gender, ethnicity and class - all issues that are implicit in the novelists' construction of a ...
... understanding these patterns will bring the possibility of restructuring society so it can better meet human needs. Examining the social landscape after World War II, social critics were struck by the difference between mid-twentieth ...
... understanding of American society. By the same token, the social critics' tendency to stress the power of social determinants over individuals leads them seriously to underestimate the complexity of the cultural response to the ...
... understanding the relationship between textual content and the environing culture, has gained currency recently. In part this may be because the rise of mass market literature has undermined the romantic understanding of the author as a ...
... understanding even the familiar canon of 'classic' eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novelists by reference to the communities to which they belonged, the trajectories of their own lives and their changing reference points as ...
Inhalt
from entrepreneurial adventure | |
the varieties of selffulfillment | |
the failure of success | |
The social critics | |
Conclusion | |
Notes | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |