The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945

Provides an overview of ways that utopian thinking has shaped American culture, focusing on the need to remake imperial USA.

Sherryl Vint (Edited by)

9781009180061, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 May 2024

332 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.3 cm, 0.617 kg

Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking about how to create a better world through daily practices of generosity, justice, and care. The chapters collected here emphasize utopianism as a practice of social transformation, not as a literary genre depicting a putatively perfect society, and urgently make the case for why we need utopian thought today. With chapters on climate change, economic justice, technology, and more, alongside chapters exploring utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, this book opens a new discussion in utopian thought and theory.

List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction: utopianism in dark times Sherryl Vint
1. Pandemics and the lesson of history Priscilla Wald
2. American futures Phillip E. Wegner
3. Engendering utopia: the force of gender and the limits of feminism Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor
4. America and/as white supremacy Edward K. Chan and Patricia Ventura
5. American spirituality Andrew Tate
6. Black escapes and Black wishlands Jerry Rafiki Jenkins
7. Latinx belonging in new world borders: Mestiz@ rhetoric and critical utopian/dystopian dialectics of ambivalence Rubén R. Mendoza, Ph.D.
8. Educating desire: young adult utopian fiction Jonathan Alexander
9. Utopia after American hegemony Peter Boxall
10. Technological fantasies Matthew Wolf-Meyer
11. Utopian spaces Roger Luckhurst
12. Environmentalism and ecotopias Gerry Canavan
13. Economic justice Hugh C. O'Connell
14. Renewing democracy Mathias Nilges
15. The time of new histories: utopian possibility in America's twenty-first century John Rieder
Works Cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]