Main street and empire : the fictional small town in the age of globalization / Ryan Poll.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Poll, Ryan, 1975-

Series:

American literatures initiative

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Cities and towns in literature.

City and town life in literature.

Cities and towns--United States.

Cities and towns.

Literature and globalization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (239 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The small town has become a national icon that circulates widely in literature, culture, and politics as an authentic American space and community. Yet there are surprisingly few critical studies that analyze the small town’s centrality to the United States’ identity and imagination. In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll addresses this need, arguing that the small town, as evoked by the image of “Main Street,” is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which America’s “everyday” stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global scale. Bringing together a broad selection of texts—from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show to the speeches of William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama—Poll examines how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century. He contends that the dominant small town, despite its innocent, nostalgic appearance, is central to the development of the U.S. empire and global capitalism.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Small Town as a Modern Nation Form

1. Sacred Islands in Modernity: The Prehistory of the Dominant Small Town

2. An Unfinished Revolution: “The Revolt from the Village” Reconsidered

3. Mapping the Modern Small Town: A Circular Imaginary

4. A New Machine in the Small- Town Garden: Periodizing an Automodernity

5. The Formation of a U.S. Fascist Aesthetics; or, Welcome to Main Street

6. Staging and Archiving the Nation: Pedagogical Theater, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and U.S. Imperialism

7. “One Happy World”: The Postmodern Small Town and the Small- Town Postmodern

8. Global Belonging: The Small Town as the World’s Home

Afterword: The Global Village

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [191]-216) and index.

ISBN:

0-8135-5294-X

1-283-63458-9

OCLC:

812066679