The presidents we imagine : two centuries of White House fictions on the page, on the stage, onscreen, and online / Jeff Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Jeff, 1958 January 25-

Series:

Studies in American thought and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Political fiction, American--History and criticism.

Political fiction, American.

Presidents in literature.

Political plays, American--History and criticism.

Political plays, American.

Presidents in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xiii, 391 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, [2009]

Summary:

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 and amazing variety of chief executives. Some of these are real presidents who have been fictionally reimagined. Others are "might-have-beens" like Philip Roth's President Charles Lindbergh. Many more have never existed except in some storyteller's mind.

In The Presidents We Imagine, Jeff Smith examines the presidency's ever-changing place in the American imagination. Ranging across different media and analyzing works of many kinds, some familiar and some never before studied, he explores the evolution of presidential fictions, their central themes, the impact on them of new and emerging media, and their largely unexamined role in the nation's real politics.

Smith traces fictions of the presidency from the plays and polemics of the eighteenth century-when the new office was born in what Alexander Hamilton called "the regions of fiction"-to the digital products of the twenty-first century, with their seemingly limitless user-defined ways of imagining the world's most important political figure. Students of American culture and politics, as well as readers interested in political fiction and film, will find here a colorful, indispensable guide to the many surprising ways Americans have been "representing" presidents even as those presidents have represented them.

Contents:

Introduction Presidents in the American Imagination 3

1 Imagining a President: George Washington and His Fictional Predecessors 14

2 Seeing Double: Clowns, Carnival, and Satire in the Antebellum Years 45

3 Deep, Yet Transparent: Myth, Mystery, and "Common Sense" in Post-Civil War Presidential Fictions 82

4 A Simple, Honest Man: Presidential Character in the Fictions of the 1930s and 1940s 120

5 The Human Element: Presidential Strength, Weakness, and Difference in the 1960s and 1970s 161

6 Who Am I?: Presidents and Their "Issues" in Fictions of the 1990s 206

7 Fictitious Times: Imagining Presidents at the Turn of the Millennium 246

Conclusion: {Your Name Here} for President 280.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 349-376) and index.

ISBN:

9780299231842

0299231844

9780299231835

0299231836

9780299231804

0299231801

OCLC:

259715911