Introduction: the critical work and critical pleasure of American literature -- Inner-self industries: soft capitalism's reproductive logic -- How America works: getting personal to get personnel -- Dress-down conquest: Americanizing top-down as bottom-up -- Afterword: payoffs
'Surveyors of Custom' explores literature's insights into how America - its soft capitalism, its 'democratised' inequality, its Americanisation of power - ticks. Joel Pfister argues that writers from Benjamin Franklin to Louise Erdrich can be read as critical 'surveyors' of cust…
"In 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne, fired from Salem's Custom House and returning to writing, reconceived his old job title, Surveyor of Customs, as his new one. Taking seriously this naming of the American author's project, Joel Pfister argues that writers from Benjamin Franklin to L…
Traces the story of French intellectual thought to demonstrate how French ideas have fundamentally shaped the modern West, citing the contributions of such figures as Descartes, Rousseau, and Voltaire.
"One of the crucial sites of contestation in current approaches to communication for social change is the status of the national identity in an era characterized by the tensions between the globalization of capitalism and myriad resurgent nationalisms. Commercial Nationalism int…
Explores the history, culture, and religion of the Italian people, shedding new light on many aspects of Italian life. How can a nation that spawned the Renaissance have produced the Mafia? How could people concerned with bella figura (keeping up appearances) have elected Silvi…
"In Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Andrew Estes examines ideas about the land as they emerge in the later fiction of this important contemporary author. McCarthy's texts are shown to be part of larger narratives about American environments. Against the backdr…
