Product Description: Through a discussion of diverse art and media such as apocalyptic thrillers, rap, and television, Swirski debunks the American political system, sieving out fact from a sea of bipartisan untruths. Engaging with close analysis and multiple case studies, this book forges a more accurate picture of contemporary American culture and of America itself...read more

Product Description: This study gives insights into the process of "imagining history" and argues the case for a humanistic approach. It shows how writers have brought alive in their work an individual struggle to comprehend some of the most important political phenomena to the 2Oth century.

Product Description: In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility—the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel’s approach to art has been influential in a number of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in history: modernism...read more

A guide for discriminating travelers offers profiles for more than nine hundred places to stay throughout eighteen European countries, including a converted German farmhouse and a medieval castle in Burgundy. Original.

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, American decision makers have been forced to confront anew questions about the role of the United States in world affairs. What are the responsibilities of the United States toward other countries? What are the appropriate uses and limitation of American power? And what, from an American point of view, would be the ideal shape of the imagined New World Order?However U...read more

Product Description: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is of interest to political theorists partly because of its association with anarchism and partly because it is thought to represent a turning point in the history of utopian/dystopian political thought and literature and of science fiction...read more

Product Description: Best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver's life and works are explored in this comprehensive, unique reference guide. Ideal for book club members and essential for high school students, this valuable resource introduces the plot summaries as well as theme and character analysis for seven of Kingsolver's major works...read more

Product Description: The world reflected in post-modernist fiction is one of chance and randomness, devoid of historical intelligibility. Stacey Olster challenges this view by distinguishing American post-modernism--with respect to the views of historical processes that its practitioners share...read more

Product Description: In such popular television series as The West Wing and 24, in thrillers like Tom Clancy’s novels, and in recent films, plays, graphic novels, and internet cartoons, America has been led by an amazing variety of chief executives...read more

Product Description: This book takes a fresh look at English fiction produced in the 1950s. By looking at a range of authors, some canonical, some less well known, it shows that the novel of the period was far more diverse and formally experimental than previous accounts have suggested...read more

Product Description: What impact did Red Storm Rising have on Ronald Reagan's policy for dealing with the Soviet Union? Was A Clear and Present Danger a trial balloon for the administration's international war on drugs? Did the climax of Debt of Honor foreshadow the actual terrorist plans for 9/11?… And how did Jack Ryan, a lowly analyst, wind up becoming the President of the United States? Was it wishful thinking or a choreographed roadmap for the time when the defense of America was placed firmly in the hands of backroom strategists? The Jack Ryan Agenda places each of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels ( from his bestselling debut The Hunt for the Red October to his latest The Teeth of the Tiger) within the historical context of the U...read more

Product Description: An important new collection of original essays that examine how Ellison's landmark novel, Invisible Man (1952), addresses the social, cultural, political, economic, and racial contradictions of America. Commenting on the significance of Mark Twain's writings, Ralph Ellison wrote that "a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal...read more

Introduces the work of American author Barbara Kingsolver and gives suggestions for incorporating it into a reading and writing curriculum.

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

American literature is profoundly, almost inescapably political. America's most thoughtful authors long ago realized that it was through the novel, the novella, and the story that philosophic education of America's citizens would best be undertaken. In this fascinating new anthology of original essays, ten leading scholars explore the ways in which American civic education has been informally advanced through literature. Delving into the works of authors ranging from Mark Twain to William Faulkner to Octavia Butler, these essays reflect on the close relationship between democracy and literature. They convey an understanding that the greatest American literary works are also works of profound philosophical insight. Through careful analysis, Democracy's Literature illustrates that democracy and literature are natural partners, forging a relationship that America's greatest authors have long realized in their subtle efforts to craft a democratic public philosophy.

Product Description: The controversial, almost mythic Louisiana politician Huey P. Long inspired not just one but six American novels, published between 1934 and 1946. And he continues to resonate in American cultural memory, appearing in a 1995 work of historical fiction...read more

Product Description: This is the first book-length study of all of Highsmith's work, including the short fiction and her occasional writings, such as book reviews. It places the work in both cultural and personal context, and contains a comprehensive bibliography and review of the literature...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description:  In Writers of Conviction, Julia C. Ehrhardt examines the literary careers of four American writers who have not received the critical attention they deserve: Zona Gale, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane, and Josephine Herbst...read more

Product Description: Focusing on the core novels, including "The Sound and the Fury", "Absalom, Absalom!", "Sanctuary", "Light in August 2003", and "Go Down, Moses", David Minter illuminates Faulkner's mature fiction: the tensions at play within the fiction and the creativity not only exhibited by the author but also extended to his characters and required of his readers...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Patterns of Power in American Political Fiction presents a study of power as it manifests itself in ideology, structure, process and personality, and provides political and literary frameworks for critically examining and teaching political fiction.

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Product Description: Drawing upon the disciplines of literary analysis and political theory, this study reviews and considers the notable influence of actual political events and ideologies on Hawthorne, and argues that he reacted to radical reform ideologies with a set of beliefs and understandings characteristic of the conservative political thinker...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)