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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... values of entrepreneurial independence, thrift and self-discipline, and cast doubt on the old equation between material and social advance. These structural changes were accompanied in American life by a reexamination of traditional ...
... values so that they will be more fruitful for us as people and as a civilization. To gain some purchase on the present, it is crucial to elucidate what has happened to the American Dream in the years after World War II. This book ...
Elizabeth Long. Moreover, these perceptions and evaluations of the world - beliefs, values, taken-for-granted assumptions - lie at the heart of the American Dream. Realism, then, provides a set of conventions that make a country's ...
... values and attitudes of middle-class Americans. And if, as is the case, most bestsellers are not only conventional but relatively ephemeral in influence, this quality, too, is a positive one for my purposes, since it makes them an ...
... values like individual achievement. Indeed, the amount of attention sociologists have given to achievement and ... value system, and either condemned the ideology of success, or attempted to unearth its intrapsychic dynamics to foster ...
Inhalt
from entrepreneurial adventure | |
the varieties of selffulfillment | |
the failure of success | |
The social critics | |
Conclusion | |
Notes | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |