Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter 1
2. Contents 5
3. Notes on Contributors 8
4. Representing and Imagining America 11
5. Part I Imagining the Foundations
6. 1. Imagining the Nation: The Frontier Thesis and the Creating of America 15
7. 2. Imagining the Frontier 24
8. 3. The Magic Kingdom: Europe in the American Mind 34
9. 4. America Imagines Itself in its National Holidays: Collective Memories of the Founding Fathers 44
10. Part II Representing Regions and Ethnicity
11. 5. Folklore and American Democratic Literature 57
12. 6. Not Letting the Side Down: Negotiating Cultural Differences in White Readings of Affo-American Literature 66
13. 7. Scarlett, Rhett and the Wild Frontier 74
14. 8. Conceptual Metaphors for American Ethnic Formations 84
15. 9. Contradictory Southerner: Sam Ervin Confronts Multicultural America 92
16. 10. The Foreign Policy Role of US Diasporas and its Domestic Consequences 101
17. Part III Imagining Modem America: Living on the Edge
18. 11 They Don’t Have a Name for What He Is’: Serial Killer Culture 115
19. 12. Textualizing the Margins: Recuperating Alienation in American Crime Fiction 122
20. 13 Urban Reality and the Metafictional Novel 130
21. Part IV Representing America to the World
22. 14 Comic Schemes and American Dreams: Preston Sturges and Hollywood 141
23. 15. Counterfeit Yanks: War, Austerity and Britain’s American Dream 150
24. 16. Barnett Newman, Abstract Expressionism and American Cultural Conventions 160
25. 17. Representing the Company: The Rise of the Autonomous Corporation with the Loss of the Founding Father 170
26. Part V Representing Ideology
27. 18 US Expansionism: From the Monroe Doctrine to the Open Door 181
28. 19. America and Ideology: Roosevelt to Wilson 191
29. 20. JFK, Vietnam and the Public Mind 200
30. 21. Defending the West: Ideology and US Foreign Policy during the Cold War 210
31. Part VI Imagining Democracy
32. 22 Undemocratic Vistas: Radical Form and Radical Critique in Dos Passos’s U.S.A. 223
33. 23. Mr Innocence Goes to Washington: Hollywood and the Mythology of American Politics 232
34. 24. Electing America 240