Books in the American Culture series

The book traces the reverberations of Ronald Reagan's ideology in selected Hollywood blockbuster movies. The analysis includes filmic content as well as production and distribution. It is concluded that political metaphors and an economic setting inherited from the 1980s continue to shape the style and content of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking.

The book analyzes debates about civil-military relationships in post-9/11 wars, observing how civic activists promote Indigenous warrior traditions as role models for US society. It reads non-Native military life writing and interactions with civilians as "ceremonial storytelling" that negotiates war experience and collective identity.

The study situates Norman Mailer in the tradition of Modernism, showing how he imbibed the worldview of a coterie of male modernist writers who imposed their notions of art and literature and politics on the movement. Mailer followed a specific ideological path, moving from a rejection of liberalism, technocracy and mass culture to a Gnostic vision.

This study explores the cultural trajectory of Japanese American internment, both during and after World War II. It also provides the most exhaustive biographical outline of John Okada to date and refutes the assumption that his novel No-No Boy was all but shunned when first published. A close reading positions the book within world literature.

Following Koselleck's history of concepts, Americanness is approached as a semantic field at the intersection of several antebellum concepts (nation, representation, sympathy, race, and womanhood, among others), in the various stages of their respective histories. The book is also a period study of major American writers of the antebellum era.

The term "utopia" implies both "good place" and "nowhere". The debate over utopian models of society has fallen on all points between these contradictory definitions. This work engages the literary cross section of contemporary feminist science fiction to examine the tradition of utopian writing.

A provocative examination of contemporary expressions of black culture in America.

Baseball card collecting has become a pursuit taken seriously by American men of the baby boom generation. This work employs interviews with collectors, dealers, and hobbyists to ask what this hobby tells us about nostalgia, work, play, masculinity, and race and gender relations among collectors.

Uses the story of the Rosenbergs (executed for espionage in 1953) to explore the function of narrative in the formation of history. Argues that the story was an embedded narrative in the developing Cold War, both required by that Cold War framework and furthering its construction.

Brings a sense of social context to a field dominated by purely formalist criticism. By revealing the struggles of American poets as they address important questions about art, social life, and the oppression they encounter, Damon aims to add a new dimension to cultural theory.

In this work, the author focuses on the conquest of the North Pole as she reveals how popular print and visual media, including photography and video, defined and shaped American national ideologies from the early 20th century to the present.