Remapping Citizenship And The Nation In African American Literature

Download Remapping Citizenship And The Nation In African American Literature full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Remapping Citizenship And The Nation In African American Literature ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature

Author : Stephen Knadler
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135247188
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (352 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature by : Stephen Knadler

Download or read book Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature written by Stephen Knadler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a reading of periodicals, memoirs, speeches, and fiction from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance, this study re-examines various myths about a U.S. progressive history and about an African American counter history in terms of race, democracy, and citizenship. Reframing 19th century and early 20th-century African-American cultural history from the borderlands of the U.S. empire where many African Americans lived, worked and sought refuge, Knadler argues that these writers developed a complicated and layered transnational and creolized political consciousness that challenged dominant ideas of the nation and citizenship. Writing from multicultural contact zones, these writers forged a "new black politics"—one that anticipated the current debate about national identity and citizenship in a twenty-first century global society. As Knadler argues, they defined, created, and deployed an alternative political language to re-imagine U.S. citizenship and its related ideas of national belonging, patriotism, natural rights, and democratic agency.

Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature

Author : Stephen Knadler
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135247196
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (352 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature by : Stephen Knadler

Citizenship, Law and Literature

Author : Caroline Koegler
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110749831
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Citizenship, Law and Literature by : Caroline Koegler

Download or read book Citizenship, Law and Literature written by Caroline Koegler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.

African American Literature in Transition, 1850–1865: Volume 4, 1850–1865

Author : Teresa Zackodnik
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110869019X
Total Pages : 707 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (86 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis African American Literature in Transition, 1850–1865: Volume 4, 1850–1865 by : Teresa Zackodnik

Download or read book African American Literature in Transition, 1850–1865: Volume 4, 1850–1865 written by Teresa Zackodnik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 707 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly 'free' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.

See Justice Done

Author : Christopher Michael Brown
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496848217
Total Pages : 131 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis See Justice Done by : Christopher Michael Brown

Download or read book See Justice Done written by Christopher Michael Brown and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2024-01-15 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition, author Christopher Michael Brown argues that African American literature has profound and deliberate legal roots. Tracing this throughline from the eighteenth century to the present, Brown demonstrates that engaging with legal culture in its many forms—including its conventions, paradoxes, and contradictions—is paramount to understanding Black writing. Brown begins by examining petitions submitted by free and enslaved Blacks to colonial and early republic legislatures. A virtually unexplored archive, these petitions aimed to demonstrate the autonomy and competence of their authors. Brown also examines early slave autobiographies such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Mary Prince’s History, which were both written in the form of legal petitions. These works invoke scenes of Black competence and of Black madness, repeatedly and simultaneously. Early Black writings reflect how a Black Atlantic world, organized by slavery, refused to acknowledge Black competence. By including scenes of Black madness, these narratives critique the violence of the law and predict the failure of future legal counterparts, such as Plessy v. Ferguson, to remedy injustice. Later chapters examine the works of more contemporary writers, such as Sutton E. Griggs, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones, and explore varied topics from American exceptionalism to the legal trope of "colorblindness." In chronicling these interactions with jurisprudential logics, See Justice Done reveals the tensions between US law and Black experiences of both its possibilities and its perils.

The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home

Author : John Cullen Gruesser
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820344060
Total Pages : 169 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home by : John Cullen Gruesser

Download or read book The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home written by John Cullen Gruesser and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home, John Cullen Gruesser establishes that African American writers at the turn of the twentieth century responded extensively and idiosyncratically to overseas expansion and its implications for domestic race relations. He contends that the work of these writers significantly informs not only African American literary studies but also U.S. political history. Focusing on authors who explicitly connect the empire abroad and the empire at home (James Weldon Johnson, Sutton Griggs, Pauline E. Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others), Gruesser examines U.S. black participation in, support for, and resistance to expansion. Race consistently trumped empire for African American writers, who adopted positions based on the effects they believed expansion would have on blacks at home. Given the complexity of the debates over empire and rapidity with which events in the Caribbean and the Pacific changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it should come as no surprise that these authors often did not maintain fixed positions on imperialism. Their stances depended on several factors, including the foreign location, the presence or absence of African American soldiers within a particular text, the stage of the author's career, and a given text's relationship to specific generic and literary traditions. No matter what their disposition was toward imperialism, the fact of U.S. expansion allowed and in many cases compelled black writers to grapple with empire. They often used texts about expansion to address the situation facing blacks at home during a period in which their citizenship rights, and their very existence, were increasingly in jeopardy.

Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture

Author : Ana M. Manzanas
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317917960
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (179 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture by : Ana M. Manzanas

Download or read book Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture written by Ana M. Manzanas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY, during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.

Cities, Borders and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film

Author : Ana M. Manzanas
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136824898
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (368 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Cities, Borders and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film by : Ana M. Manzanas

Download or read book Cities, Borders and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film written by Ana M. Manzanas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the spatial morphologies represented in a wide range of contemporary ethnic American literary and cinematic works. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of space as a living organism, Edward Soja’s writings on the postmetropolis, Marc Augé’s notion of the non-place, Manuel Castells’ space of flows, and Michel de Certeau’s theories of walking as a practice, the volume extends previous theorizations by examining how spatial uses, appropriations, strictures, ruptures, and reconfigurations function in literary texts and films that represent inhabitants of racial-ethnic borderlands and migrational U.S. cities. The authors argue for the necessity of an alternative poetics of place that makes room for those who move beyond the spaces of traditional visibility—displaced and homeless people, undocumented workers, hybrid and/or marginalized populations rendered invisible by the cultural elite, yet often disciplined by agents of surveillance. Building upon Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of liminal space as a sphere in which narratives intersect, clash, or cooperate, this study recasts spatial paradigms to insert an array of emergent geographies of invisibility that the volume traverses via the analysis of works by Chuck Palahniuk, Helena Viramontes, Karen Tei Yamashita, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alejandro Morales, and Li-Young Lee, among others, and films such as Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor, Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Babel.

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature

Author : Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317818210
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (178 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature by : Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger

Download or read book Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature written by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature

Author : Emma Staniland
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134614977
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (346 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature by : Emma Staniland

Download or read book Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature written by Emma Staniland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs

Author : Tess Chakkalakal
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820340324
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs by : Tess Chakkalakal

Download or read book Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs written by Tess Chakkalakal and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperium in Imperio (1899) was the first black novel to countenance openly the possibility of organized black violence against Jim Crow segregation. Its author, a Baptist minister and newspaper editor from Texas, Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933), would go on to publish four more novels; establish his own publishing company, one of the first secular publishing houses owned and operated by an African American in the United States; and help to found the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Tennessee. Alongside W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Griggs was a key political and literary voice for black education and political rights and against Jim Crow. Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs examines the wide scope of Griggs's influence on African American literature and politics at the turn of the twentieth century. Contributors engage Griggs's five novels and his numerous works of nonfiction, as well as his publishing and religious careers. By taking up Griggs's work, these essays open up a new historical perspective on African American literature and the terms that continue to shape American political thought and culture.

The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature

Author : Christopher Dowd
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136902414
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (369 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature by : Christopher Dowd

Download or read book The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature written by Christopher Dowd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the development of literary constructions of Irish-American identity from the mid-nineteenth century arrival of the Famine generation through the Great Depression. It goes beyond an analysis of negative Irish stereotypes and shows how Irish characters became the site of intense cultural debate regarding American identity, with some writers imagining Irishness to be the antithesis of Americanness, but others suggesting Irishness to be a path to Americanization. This study emphasizes the importance of considering how a sense of Irishness was imagined by both Irish-American writers conscious of the process of self-definition as well as non-Irish writers responsive to shifting cultural concerns regarding ethnic others. It analyzes specific iconic Irish-American characters including Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlet O’Hara, as well as lesser-known Irish monsters who lurked in the American imagination such as T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney and Frank Norris’ McTeague. As Dowd argues, in contemporary American society, Irishness has been largely absorbed into a homogenous white culture, and as a result, it has become a largely invisible ethnicity to many modern literary critics. Too often, they simply do not see Irishness or do not think it relevant, and as a result, many Irish-American characters have been de-ethnicized in the critical literature of the past century. This volume reestablishes the importance of Irish ethnicity to many characters that have come to be misread as generically white and shows how Irishness is integral to their stories.

Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture

Author : Denis Jonnes
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317649486
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture by : Denis Jonnes

Download or read book Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture written by Denis Jonnes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demands placed on many young Americans as a result of the Cold War give rise to an increasingly age-segregated society. This separation allowed adolescents and young adults to begin to formulate an identity distinct from previous generations, and was a significant factor in their widespread rejection of contemporary American society. This study traces the emergence of a distinctive post-war family dynamic between parent and adolescent or already adult child. In-depth readings of individual writers such as, Arthur Miller, William Styron, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and Sylvia Plath, situate their work in relation to the Cold War and suggest how the figuring of adolescents and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of American youth. This book is a superb research tool for any student or academic with an interest in youth culture, cultural studies, American studies, cold war studies, twentieth-century American literature, history of the family, and age studies.

The African American Sonnet

Author : Timo Mueller
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496817842
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The African American Sonnet by : Timo Mueller

Download or read book The African American Sonnet written by Timo Mueller and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel," Gwendolyn Brooks's "First fight. Then fiddle." Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich tradition that formed after the Civil War and comprises more than a thousand sonnets by African American poets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove all wrote sonnets. Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Müller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history. He examines the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the postwar period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. In this book, Müller examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe. In the tightly circumscribed space of sonnets, these poets mounted evocative challenges to the discursive and material boundaries they confronted.

Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature

Author : Stephen Fender
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113663228X
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (366 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature by : Stephen Fender

Download or read book Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature written by Stephen Fender and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-08-22 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economic crisis in the nation’s cities and factories. Over eighty years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic images of country poor whites – in the novels of John Steinbeck, the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers’ life histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project. Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New Deal’s radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to undermine their condition. How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and around the country Depression, and the myths on which they drew.

Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction

Author : Aliki Varvogli
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136627030
Total Pages : 181 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (366 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction by : Aliki Varvogli

Download or read book Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction written by Aliki Varvogli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a critical study and analysis of American fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on novels that ‘go outward’ literally and metaphorically, and it concentrates on narratives that take place mainly away from the US’s geographical borders. Varvogli draws on current theories of travel globalization and post-national studies, and proposes a dynamic model that will enable scholars to approach contemporary American fiction and assess recent changes and continuities. Concentrating on work by Philip Caputo, Dave Eggers, Norman Rush and Russell Banks, the book proposes that American literature’s engagement with Africa has shifted and needs to be approached using new methodologies. Novels by Amy Tan, Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers are examined in the context of travel and globalization, and works by Chang-rae Lee, Ethan Canin, Dinaw Mengestu and Jhumpa Lahiri are used as examples of the changing face of the American immigrant novel, and the changing meaning of national belonging.

American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History

Author : Peter Swirski
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136723390
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (367 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History by : Peter Swirski

Download or read book American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History written by Peter Swirski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States today is afflicted with political alienation, militarized violence, institutionalized poverty, and social agony. Worst of all, perhaps, it is afflicted with chronic and acute ahistoricism. America insist on ignoring the context of its present dilemmas. It insists on forgetting what preceded the headlines of today and on denying continuity with history. It insists, in short, on its exceptionalism. American Utopia and Social Engineering sets out to correct this amnesia. It misses no opportunity to flesh out both the historical premises and the political promises behind the social policies and political events of the period. These interdisciplinary concerns provide, in turn, the framework for the analyses of works of American literature that mirror their times and mores. Novels considered include: B.F. Skinner and Walden Two (1948), easily the most scandalous utopia of the century, if not of all times; Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), an anatomy of political disfranchisement American-style; Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (1982), a neo-Darwinian beast fable about morality in the thermonuclear age; Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome (1986), a diagnostic novel about engineering violence out of America’s streets and minds; and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), an alternative history of homegrown ‘soft’ fascism. With the help of the five novels and the social models outlined therein, Peter Swirski interrogates key aspects of sociobiology and behavioural psychology, voting and referenda procedures, morality and altruism, multilevel selection and proverbial wisdom, violence and chip-implant technology, and the adaptive role of emotions in our private and public lives.