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Product Description: Family Plots traces the fault lines of the Freudian family romance and holds that the "family plot" is very much alive in post-World War II American culture. It cuts across all genres, insinuating, criticizing, reinforcing, and reinventing itself in all forms of cultural production and consumption...read more

Product Description: Heller examines the quest-romance genre and contends that we are witnessing the genre's development as one of the most fundamental formal expressions of women's awakening to selfhood, mobility, and influence in both American culture and mythology.

From American flag decals and replicas of the World Trade Center to an emotionally fueled advertising campaign for The New York times, the marketing and commodification of September 11 reveals the contradictory processes by which consumers in the U.S. (and around the world) communicate and construct national identity through cultural and symbolic goods. Contributed essays take critical stock of the role that consumer goods, media and press outlets, commercial advertising, marketers, and corporate public relations have played in shaping cultural memory of a national tragedy.