What have depictions of the working class in popular culture added to our understanding of the professional lives of Americans? Scenes from the American Working Class: This Hard Land offers twelve unique and profound answers from some of the most impactful and timeless novels (O! Pioneers, Ann Vickers, and Native Son), films (Blue Collar, Wall Street, and Other People’s Money), television shows (The Wire and Mad Me...

Though it ended more than thirty years ago, the Cold War still casts a long shadow over American society. Red Reckoning examines how the great ideological conflict of the twentieth century transformed the nation and forced Americans to reconsider almost every aspect of their society, culture, and identity.Using an interdisciplinary approach, the volume’s contributors examine a broad array of topics, including the Cold War’s impact on national security, race relations, gun ...

The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions-and snares-of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le...

How does the way in which a democratic polity mourn its losses shape its political outcomes? How might it shape those outcomes? American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience answers these questions with a critical study of American public mourning. Employing mourning as a lens through which to view the shortcomings of American democracy, it offers an argument for a tragic, complex, and critical mode of mourning that it contrasts with the nationalist, romantic, and nostalgic responses t...

Though he was a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature, American novelist John Steinbeck (1902–1968) has frequently been censored. Even in the twenty-first century, nearly ninety years after his work first appeared in print, Steinbeck's novels, stories, and plays still generate controversy: his 1937 book Of Mice and Men was banned in some Mississippi schools in 2002, and as recently as 2009, he made the American Library Association's annual list of...

The Democratic Arts of Mourning reflects on the variety of ways in which mourning affects political and social life. In recent decades, political theorists have increasingly examined and explored the themes of loss, grief, and mourning. With an introduction that contextualizes the turn to mourning in previous scholarship on the politics of tragedy, this book includes twelve chapters that clarify the intertwinement between politics and mourning. The chapters are organized into five thematic...