Throughout American history there has been an oddly close relationship between the seductive appeals of narrative fiction and those of political rhetoric and advocacy. The aim of Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience is to explore what political narratives and the cultural poetics behind them reveal about the way our personal and intimate lives are deeply connected with the public arena and the political process.


The first section of the book, “The Politics of Fictions,” contains essays focused on works of fiction consciously dramatizing the political realm. The second group of contributions, “The Fictions of Politics,” explores structures and motifs from the narrative arts in discourses of American political life, and the interactions of public institutions and policy with forms of fictional representation, from novels to popular music and TV drama.


The essays presented here broaden the conversation in American literary studies about what constitutes “the political” in literature and culture by reintroducing the dimension of institutional or representative politics. Likewise, Stories of Nation aims to repair the lines of communication between the idea that all fiction is political, and the view that political speech is a subgenre of literature all the more in need of examination in a highly polarized society.


CONTENTS



INTRODUCTION

     Martin Griffin and Christopher Hebert



PART I: The POLITICS of FICTIONS



THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN ADAM:

Myth and the Contemporary American Political Novel       

     Christopher Hebert


“BE YOURSELVES DECLARATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE”: Nineteenth-Century Literature for Twenty-First-Century

Citizenship

     Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson


“A DAY-DREAM, AND YET A FACT”:

Universal Emancipation in The Blithedale Romance

     Luke Bresky


“SPEAKING AS AN AMERICAN TO AMERICANS”:

James Russell Lowell’s Harvard Commemoration Ode

and the Idea of Nationhood

     Stephen J. Adams


“IMPRISONED IN THE PRESENT”:

Class Conflict as Trauma in W. D. Howells’s

A Hazard of New Fortunes

     Matthew Blanshei


LOCKEAN FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE AMERICAN

LITERARY TRADITION: The Case of Henry James

     David Witzling


CHARACTER AND CHARISMATIC AUTHORITY

IN ROBERT PENN WARREN’S ALL THE KING’S MEN

AND EDWIN O’CONNOR’S THE LAST HURRAH

     Anthony Hutchison


GENTLE PROVOCATEUR:

Richard Brautigan, San Francisco, and The Abortion:

An Historical Romance 1966

     Jerry Giddens



PART II: The FICTIONS of POLITICS



FAILURES OF CONSENSUS:

Contesting Election Sermons in Puritan New England

     Meredith Marie Neuman


TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY, NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE,

AND THE COMPLEX LEGACY OF HENDRICK AUPAUMUT

     Katy L. Chiles


DAVE BURRELL’S BAGHDAD BLUES:

Fiction, Race, and History in 1950's Iraq

     Martin Griffin


THE WHOLE UNITED STATES IS SOUTHERN:

Country Music and the Selling of Southern Conservatism

in the Nixon Era

     J. Lester Feder


APOCALYPSE NOW AND THE CHARM SCHOOL:

Film, Literature, and the Making of CNN’s “Tailwind” Disaster     

     Jerry Lembcke


24: The Following Takes Place in Real Time

     Thomas Doherty


CHAGRIN AND THE POLITICS OF AMERICAN AESTHETICS

     Constance DeVereaux

christopherhebert