Books in the Politics, Literature, & Film series

The authors of this volume explore the Bard's dramatization of perennial questions about human nature, moral virtue, and statesmanship. Reading his plays as works of philosophical literature enhances our understanding of political life and provides a source of advice and inspiration for the citizens and statesmen of today and tomorrow.

How does Game of Thrones mirror international politics and how may the series provide a useful tool for better understanding the theories of international relations? This book connects international relations theories to the series, providing examples from characters whose actions reflect applied scenarios of decision-making and strategy.

As political units grow it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a shared sense of humanity and to recognize people as individuals rather than anonymous beings. To overcome our most pressing political issues we need to develop a moral imagination so that we may renew our sense of connectedness and responsibility to one another. Bringing together politics and art is one way this can be accomplished. This book draws upon political sources as well as works in literature, film and theater to show the limits of politics and the need for a moral imagination.

This collection, the first of its kind, brings together specially commissioned academic essays to mark fifty years since the death of John Kennedy Toole.

Imagination and Environmental Political Thought: The Aftermath of Thoreau seeks to correct oversimplified readings of Henry David Thoreau's political thought by elucidating a key tension within his imagination. With the celebration of Thoreau's two-hundredth birthday now past, this study outlines, and builds on, his own understanding of imagination and considers its implications for environmental politics.Despite the use of the word, ';aftermath,' Thoreau's legacy for environmental political thought is primarily constructive and foundational for modern environmentalism. Thoreau's virtues and vices have been inherited by his environmentally-conscious readers. The author of Walden's preference for an abstract, ahistorical ';higher law,' his radical concept of autonomy, and his frustration with government and community foster an impractical political thought characteristic of an idyllic imagination. Nevertheless, Thoreau demonstrates a more prudential and moral imagination by emphasizing the inescapable relationship between the moral order of individuals and the order of political communities and by pioneering the central questions of humanity's relationship to non-human nature. Can this tension of imaginations be resolved? What are the consequences of this tension? Thoreau's overall vision ultimately creates significant problems with which environmentalists still struggle. While Thoreau's emphasis on freedom and the immaterial aspects of human and non-human nature are of considerable value, his abstract political morality, misanthropy and escapism must be resisted both for the sake of environmental well-being and human dignity.In addition, this book is an exercise in re-thinking how the humanities may provide scholars critical insights to better diagnose and respond to the environmental challenges of our time.

This book analyzes major films about the American political process since the 1930s. It considers the films' major themes about politics, ideology, and representation of race and gender over the past several decades.

To understand the movements of democratic society one must appreciate fictional narratives and not depend on rationalistic argumentation and scientific analyses. This book examines the effects of storytelling in democratic culture and political life, as it articulates our aspirations, communicates our fears, and criticizes our reality.

Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Film and Literature applies historical and contemporary political and rhetorical theory to current popular culture to discuss the problem of the displaced autonomous self and the quest for a meaningful life.

This book consists of short essays on approximately fifty American political films. It explores the extent to which films take on the political issues of the day and their influence on public perceptions of politics.

This book analyzes works of late 20th century literature to unearth themes related to western classical liberal societies. The analysis suggests new ways of thinking about building political philosophies capable of replacing the classical liberal model.

Lights, Camera, Execution! engages in detailed critical analysis of nine different films about capital punishment in the United States. It examines well-known movies from the last thirty years; explores the cinematic techniques used; and identifies common themes such as race and human dignity.

Updike & Politics presents the first collection of essays devoted to the political aspects of Updike's work and showcases a variety of international perspectives.

This book revisits representations of AIDS in the 1980s in the U.S. in order to highlight a discourse of trauma and witness that emerged in the wake of a crisis. The book also emphasizes the potential of literary language to call attention to historical trauma where other discourses may fail.

The strange and wonderful place of Twin Peaks captivated audiences for more than two decades before its long-awaited return to television in 2017. In this edited collection, the authors approach Twin Peaks from a variety of perspectives with the concept of the political at its center.

This book looks at why Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is either the most inspirational or the cruelest film American cinema has ever produced. It depicts, perhaps unwittingly, an ontological war in which two well-matched adversaries fight a series of pitched battles that neither side can win without producing tragic remainders.

Reality is made up of absolute and casualty ideals. This book analyzes the lower aspects of absolute ideals that result in personal and social dysfunction and the ultimate end of civilization. Conversely, a society based on casualty and justice is stable and vibrant. It is a classless society, free of gender and ethnic biases.

This book examines the intersection of fictional narratives and political philosophy, focusing specifically on the use of short stories to teach the classic works of political philosophy. It is a resource for scholars and teachers of politics, philosophy, and literature.

The Declaration of Independence claims that individuals need liberty to pursue happiness, but provides little guidance on the ';what' of happiness. Happiness studies and liberal theory are incomplete guides. Happiness studies offer insights into what makes people happy but happiness policy risks becoming doctrinaire. Liberal theory is better on personal liberty, but weak on the ';what' of happiness. My argument is that American novelists are surer guides on the pursuit of happiness. Treated as political thinkers, my book offers a close reading of four American novelists, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and their critique of the pursuit of happiness. With a critical and friendly eye, they present the shortcomings of pursuing happiness in a liberal nation but also present alternatives and correctives possible in America. Our novelists point us toward each other in friendship as our greatest resource to guide us towards happiness.

This history of the early American film industry identifies key political aspects in the rise of the classical Hollywood system. It uniquely identifies and explores the political development of American film that shows how movies shaped political culture and consumer capitalism in the twentieth century.

Cowboy Politics uses key works of literature, film, and television to explore how westerns address political challenges of Western civilization. This book tracks how westerns supplement liberal politics with republican, populist, perfectionist, and environmentalist politics.

This book offers a combined historical and aesthetic analysis of five novels from Philip Roth's later career. It reads these works in the context of political, cultural, and literary developments in America from the New Deal to the present.

Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer is the first sustained treatment of Percy as a political thinker. The book argues that Percy provides a distinctive approach to politics, one that might allow us to give up the dangerous longing for limitless progress and perfection in our lives.

Milton's Socratic Rationalism focuses on the influence of Milton's years of private study of classical authors, chiefly Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle, on Paradise Lost. It examines the conversations of Adam and Eve as a mode of discourse closely aligned to practices of Socrates in the dialogues of Plato and eponymous discourses of Xenophon.

Sinclair Lewis was one of the most astute observers of American social and political life. Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy is a highly readable analysis of his novels. The book examines each of Lewis's novels on key themes in the history of political thought and democracy including freedom and purpose, success and materialism, and nationalism and race. Lewis is revealed to be an unapologetic individualist and a fierce humanitarian.

This book demonstrates how government bureaucracy is portrayed in the top ten box office grossing films from 2000-2015. Perhaps unsurprisingly, government is generally portrayed poorly, but individual government bureaucrats are typically depicted positively.

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare's political outlook by comparing some of the playwright's best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccol Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. By situating Shakespeare ';between' these two thinkers, the distinctly modern trajectory of the playwright's work becomes visible. Throughout his career, Shakespeare interrogates the divine right of kings, absolute monarchy, and the metaphor of the body politic. Simultaneously he helps to lay the groundwork for modern politics through his dramatic explorations of consent, liberty, and political violence. We can thus understand Shakespeare's corpus as a kind of eulogy: a funeral speech dedicated to outmoded and deficient theories of politics. We can also understand him as a revolutionary political thinker who, along with Machiavelli and Hobbes, reimagined the origins and ends of government. All three thinkers understood politics primarily as a response to our mortality. They depict politics as the art of managing and organizing human bodiescaring for their needs, making space for the satisfaction of desires, and protecting them from the threat of violent death. This book features new readings of Shakespeare's plays that illuminate the playwright's major political preoccupations and his investment in materialist politics.

This collection of essays explores the philosophical and political dimensions of America as revealed by AMC's Mad Men, investigating topics including freedom, equality, consumerism and justice.

This book seeks to fill a double lacuna in Borges scholarship. For one, this scholarship has been largely developed through the lens of literary and cultural studies, and not by political theorists who bring a distinct disciplinary perspective into the reading of literary works. Secondly, mainstream interpreters have overlooked or have not analyzed enough Borges's political sympathies. This book does not evaluate if these sympathies are truthful to political and historical facts or philosophical theories; rather, she shows in which aspects and around which topics Borges finds inspiration and gives literary form to the political. His texts abound with concepts and events such as liberty, individuality, war, and revolution, and they deal with topics such as the legitimacy of authority, the limits of reason, and the principle of representation, among others. This book also addresses Borges's democratic sensitivity and his critique of populism and militarism as related to salient national and global historical events that inspired his works. Above all, it calls attention to Borges's belief in the pre-eminence of individual liberty, his rejection of political oppression, and his warning against civic indifference brought about by an isolated individualism. This book may be of interest to students and professors of politics, philosophy and literature. It may also interest literary critics and readers who want to approach Borges's works with a political rather than a literary or a cultural lens.

Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters argues that Huxley is not a man of letters engaged in politics, but a political thinker who chooses literature to spread his ideas. His preference for the dystopian genre is due to his belief in the tremendous impact of dystopia on twentieth-century political thought. His political thinking is not systematic, but this does not stop his analysis from supplying elements that are original and up-to-date, and that represent fascinating contributions of political theory in all the spheres that he examines from anti-Marxism to anti-positivism, from political realism to elitism, from criticism of mass society to criticism of totalitarianism, from criticism of ideologies to the future of liberal democracy, from pacifism to ecological communitarianism.Huxley clearly grasped the unsolved issues of contemporary liberalism, and the importance of his influence on many twentieth-century and present-day political thinkers ensures that his ideas remain indispensable in the current liberal-democratic debate. Brave New World is without doubt Huxley's most successful political manifesto. While examining the impassioned struggle for the development of all human potentialities, it yet manages not to close the doors definitively on the rebirth of utopia in the age of dystopia.