"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 ... Read morethe 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 Show Less