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A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government
Sean McCann
€ 89.66
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Description for A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government
Hardback. There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less profound an impact on American fiction. This book illuminates the fundamental concern with democratic sovereignty that informs the literary works of the twentieth century. Series: 20/21. Num Pages: 264 pages, black & white illustrations. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 2ABM; DSBH; DSK; JPHL. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 168 x 243 x 25. Weight in Grams: 580.
There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less profound an impact on American fiction. A Pinnacle of Feeling is the first book to examine twentieth-century literature's deep fascination with the modern presidency and with the ideas about the relationship between state power and democracy that underwrote the rise of presidential authority. Sean McCann challenges prevailing critical interpretations through revelatory new readings of major writers, including Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth. He argues that these writers not only represented or satirized presidents, but echoed political thinkers who cast the chief executive as the agent of the sovereign will of the American people. They viewed the president as ideally a national redeemer, and they took that ideal as a model and rival for their own work. A Pinnacle of Feeling illuminates the fundamental concern with democratic sovereignty that informs the most innovative literary works of the twentieth century, and shows how these works helped redefine and elevate the role of executive power in American culture.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2008
Publisher
Princeton University Press United States
Number of pages
264
Condition
New
Series
20/21
Number of Pages
264
Place of Publication
New Jersey, United States
ISBN
9780691136950
SKU
V9780691136950
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Sean McCann
Sean McCann is professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of "Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism".
Reviews for A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government
"McCann identifies how ambitions for the executive branch of the US government informed the 20th-century novel... Few presidents appear as literary protagonists in their own right. Instead, their position serves as an ethical benchmark
whether as an authoritarian father figure, a career goal or even the target of an assassination attempt. If this symbolic use of public office threatens to rework the presidency as a chimerical, ghostly presence in the American novel, McCann carefully rebuilds these vague impressions to illustrate how authors reimagined the issue of popular sovereignty. His key argument gains momentum by describing how the ongoing debates over the boundaries of presidential government found close literary parallels. The arguments in political science monographs and middlebrow, social forecasting non-fiction are shown as the logical counterpart to imaginative representations of government institutions."
Graham Barnfield, Times Higher Education "[T]his book stands as an inventive, somewhat original brand of literary criticism."
B. Wallenstein, Choice "It is a tribute to McCann's superb book
one of the best I have read in the past five years
that his sharp description of the Republican project is a mere side-light, not central to his concerns or his thesis. McCann's scholarship, his knowledge of American history and the debates throughout that history about presidential power, his powers of exact description, and his probing analysis of the fundamental tensions in American democracy combine to make [other's] perfectly honorable books look rather pedestrian."
John McGowan, American Literary History
whether as an authoritarian father figure, a career goal or even the target of an assassination attempt. If this symbolic use of public office threatens to rework the presidency as a chimerical, ghostly presence in the American novel, McCann carefully rebuilds these vague impressions to illustrate how authors reimagined the issue of popular sovereignty. His key argument gains momentum by describing how the ongoing debates over the boundaries of presidential government found close literary parallels. The arguments in political science monographs and middlebrow, social forecasting non-fiction are shown as the logical counterpart to imaginative representations of government institutions."
Graham Barnfield, Times Higher Education "[T]his book stands as an inventive, somewhat original brand of literary criticism."
B. Wallenstein, Choice "It is a tribute to McCann's superb book
one of the best I have read in the past five years
that his sharp description of the Republican project is a mere side-light, not central to his concerns or his thesis. McCann's scholarship, his knowledge of American history and the debates throughout that history about presidential power, his powers of exact description, and his probing analysis of the fundamental tensions in American democracy combine to make [other's] perfectly honorable books look rather pedestrian."
John McGowan, American Literary History