During the years of Japan's “bubble” economy, writers and artists in the United States became increasingly susceptible to “Japan-bashing,” a discourse that objectified Japanese for their trade practices, overseas purchases, and tourist presence. In the following article, I draw upon a range of cultural texts, from Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's to Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun, in order to investigate how the trope of the camera-toting Japanese expatriate encapsulated the fears of the era. I then move to explore the ways in which Japanese Americans negotiated these tropes in their writings, paying particular attention to Ruth Ozeki's novel My Year of Meats. I hypothesize that Japanese Americans remained aware of the phenomenon of “Japan-bashing” throughout the era, yet did not confront it in a sustained fashion. Instead, tropes were either dismissed out of hand or, as in Ozeki's case, incorporated into a narrative before undergoing a process of gradual dismantlement.

With the discovery of the new continent in the fifteenth century, a number of existing literary traditions contributed to the creation of the early image of America. In particular, Utopian features were projected onto the terra incognita. The equation of the New World with the earthly paradise and the Promised Land placed America in the tradition of ancient and medieval Utopian texts. The early picture of America is an indirect continuation of an ambivalent gendered view of the world predominant in most Utopias and pastorals. On the one hand, America becomes the positive projection of a benevolent female Mother-Earth who provides for all basic human needs; on the other, a number of intimidating gendered topoi are intricately interwoven with these new territories. The “feminine” appears to be a central issue of literary as well as pictorial imagery in the first narratives on America. As early as Columbus and Vespucci, America was stylized or allegorized through female symbols and metaphors. This paper will try to show how ancient Utopian concepts such as visions of a gendered paradise, myths of Amazons and role reversals, as well as notions of “women communism” were integral components in the creation of America as a myth. They can be traced in the writings of Columbus and Vespucci as well as in the early illustrations of their books. A selection of textual samples and pictures will serve as a basis for the discussion of these inherent gender issues.

In his seminal work Virgin Land (1950), Henry Nash Smith depicted the bymbolic meaning that Americans attached to their Western empire during the nineteenth century. The West appealed to the American imagination variously as a possible passage to India, a land to be filled, farmed and civilized and a land to lend territorial grandeur to the existing American nation. But a certain squeamishness pervaded the attitudes of many upper-class Easterners to Western society itself, and only towards die end of the nineteenth century did they begin to show a marked enthusiasm for life in the West, and for their own pioneering origins.

The remarkable originality of Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) has been long recognized. From Sinclair Lewis's early appreciative essay onwards, the novel's significant advance over Dos Passos's three previous novels, its break with constricting convention, and its technical boldness have been repeatedly noted. Dos Passos's broad concern remains that of the traditional realist–the heavily itemized portraiture of urban social life–but in Manhattan Transfer that portraiture is energized and given fresh impact by new modes of description and new principles of narrative structure. These innovations have customarily been traced to the influence of modernist experimentation in the novel, and Dos Passos's debts to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust have been established. Yet an explanation of Dos Passos's conception of form which confines itself to literary modernism alone must be regarded as incomplete. Dos Passos's heightened visual sense and the marked painterly and cinematic qualities of his work indicate that it is to the twentieth-century pioneers in the visual arts, as well as to the pioneers in fiction, that we must look for formative influences.

Dos Passos enjoyed a lifelong interest in the visual arts. After Harvard he went to Spain to study architecture, and at one time as a young man he was unsure whether to choose fine art or literature as his main avenue of creative expression.

In his poem to the hesitating purchaser of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson names Cooper among the great romancers he has emulated, describing him as “ Cooper of the wood and wave.” That phrase names both the aspect of Cooper's work which interests me, the adventure novels, and the major subdivision of that aspect. I am not, that is, going to discuss the non-fiction, and among the fiction I am not going to discuss the Effingham or the Littlepage novels, nor even the historical novels as such. I'm going to concentrate upon the Leatherstocking saga, seen as forest books, and upon sea fiction like Afloat and Ashore, The Pilot, and The Sea Lions. I want to point out differences between the two sub-genres in fictional art and fictional success, and to try to explain those differences in terms of social and political forces. But I also want to stress the unity of the two, which is to say Cooper's identity as an adventure novelist. Because we lack a critical vocabulary for that genre, critics have, it seems to me, failed to take proper account of one of the major forms and forces of our literature. And this is particularly unfortunate in American Studies, because adventure has been so large a part of American culture.

In the 1920s, like most of the rest of the nation Kansas found itself the target of the attentions of the KKK. One of its main ways of recruiting was via existing fraternities. Using new archival material this article investigates the response of one of the leading fraternities of the times – the Masons. What emerges is a picture of mixed responses – ranging from mutual hostility to active Klan recruitment within Masonic lodges. In many ways Kansas can be seen as a microcosm of the nation, and as such this study can add to our understanding of what drove up to 10 million American men and women to join this mysterious and now hated body.

The eve of World War II saw the development of direct connections between public relations experts and issues of foreign affairs in the United States. Public relations professionals assisted both internationalists and noninterventionists to spread their arguments across the nation, helping them to hone their messages, to organize, and to raise money. All of the main citizens’ organizations created during this period sought public relations assistance in the face of growing popular awareness of global events, and with an awareness of the need for public relations counsel in the face of an increasingly measurable concept of public opinion.

This forum entry approaches the issue of Campus Carry from the viewpoint of emotion management with regard to active-shooter events. Self-defense has become the most prominent reason for owning and carrying a firearm in the Unites States in the same period that mass shootings have continued to increase. At the same time, active-shooter drills and rehearsals have become a generational experience for students. The essay examines social imaginaries by comparing concealed-carry imaginaries against those discernible in active-shooter-event instructional videos produced by the City of Houston, the Department of Homeland Security, and a number of universities. This places the Campus Carry issue in the larger context of a general securitized imaginary where, irrespective of the actual prevalence of violent crime, the campus is considered a place like any other, in the sense that violent things can happen to everyone, at any time, obliging individuals to defend themselves with firearms because the authorities are not there to immediately protect them.

This article considers the arguments of one evangelical anti-slavery advocate in order to freshly examine the relationship between abolitionism and religious revivalism. Although it has often been thought that evangelicals were wholly supportive of revivals, the Reverend Isaac Nelson rejected the 1857–58 revival in the United States and the 1859 revival in Ulster partly owing to the link between these movements and pro-slavery religion. Nelson was no insignificant figure in Irish abolitionism, as his earlier efforts to promote emancipation through the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society, and in opposition to compromise in the Free Church of Scotland and at the Evangelical Alliance, received the approbation of various high-profile American abolitionists. Unlike other opponents of revivals, Nelson was not attacking them from a perspective which was heterodox or anti-evangelical. Hence his critique of revivalism is highly significant from both an evangelical and an abolitionist point of view. The article surveys Nelson's assessment of the link between revivalism and pro-slavery religion in America, before considering his specific complaints against the revival which occurred in 1857–58 and its Ulster counterpart the following year.

This contribution focusses on the close intertwinement of Americanization, neoliberalism, and corporate globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century, on the eve of the global economic recession of 2008 and after. Many students of current globalization tend to reject the whole notion of Americanization. It is argued that these theorists have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water, namely an interest in America's strong influence in many domains globally. Yet it is also recognized that one has to move beyond a state-centrist approach in order to adequately grasp the significantly increased influence of transnational corporations over the past few decades. Therefore this article explores the major ways in which transnational corporations – in relation to US-dominated international governance – spread capitalist modernity worldwide. An attempt is made to explain how US business leaders and affiliated political power-holders managed to set the agenda of much of the global economy and why many of their foreign counterparts adopted similar neoliberal policies. The article concludes with a brief overview of major challenges and countermovements to the predominant form of capitalist globalization.

Woodrow Wilson was the first American President to leave the Western Hemisphere during his period of office, and, as befitted him, the circumstances in which he did so were neither casual nor frivolous. He went to Europe in late 1918 to take part in the peace conference following a war that the United States had played a crucial part in bringing to a decisive end. His aim was to secure a peace that accorded with the proposals he had set out in his Fourteen Points address of January 1918 and in other speeches — a peace that would be based upon justice and thus secure consent, that would embody liberal principles(the self-determination of peoples as far as practicable, the prohibition of discriminatory trade barriers), and that would be maintained by a new international organization in which the United States, breaking its tradition of isolation, would take part — a league of nations that would provide a general guarantee of “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

The symbolism of this dramatic moment, with the American prophet coming to bring redemption to the Old World, imprinted on the minds of contemporaries an image of Wilson which has affected most subsequent historiography. Viewing events from Vienna, that special victim of the First World War, Sigmund Freud found “the figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizon of Europeans, from the first unsympathetic, and… this aversion increased in the course of years the more I learned about him and the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny.”

“I am as American as April in Arizona,” Nabokov claimed in a 1966 interview. Although he repeatedly emphasized his American citizenship and the affection he held for his adopted nation, my argument is that his 1947 novel, Bend Sinister, offers us an opportunity to interrogate the received narrative of Nabokov's unproblematic arrival and assimilation into the United States. In examining the engagement with mass culture in this dystopian novel, my intention is to restore some of the political valence denied the novel by both Nabokov and his readers, and to suggest how it functions as a critique of American culture which reveals the author's profound ambivalence about his adopted nation in the early to mid-1940s. Drawing on unpublished archive material, as well as theoretical work by Theodor Adorno, this paper opens up a new approach to Nabokov's American work and demands a reassessment of his avowed apoliticism.

This essay examines reactionary, countersubversive fictions produced in the context of two conspiracy theories in the United States: the Illuminati crisis (1798–1800) and Pizzagate (2016–17). The author suggests that both cases emblematize a pornotropic aesthetic, a racialized sadomasochism that recurs across United States culture. Building on the work of Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Jennifer Christine Nash, and others, this essay argues that observers should understand countersubversive political reaction as an aesthetic project, a pornotropic fantasy that distorts underlying conditions of racial subjection. In the context of a resurgent far right that describes its enemies as “cuckolds” and frequently deploys the tropes of highly racialized pornography, this essay suggests that we might find the deep origins of pornographic, reactionary paranoia in the eighteenth century. It suggests, moreover, that understanding and contesting the underlying conditions of racial subjection require that scholars consider the power of pornotropic, countersubversive aesthetics to bring pleasure, to move people, and to order the world.

Sue Barton is the fictional redhaired nursing heroine of a series of novels written for young women. Recalled by several generations of women readers with affection, Sue Barton has remained in print ever since the publication of the first novel in the series: Sue Barton, Student Nurse, written by Helen Dore Boylston, was published in America in 1936. Neither the covers of her four novels now in paperback, nor the publisher's catalogue entry, however, acknowledge Sue Barton's age: “Sue Barton Series – The everyday stories of redheaded Sue Barton and hospital life as she progresses from being a student nurse through her varied nursing career.”

The catalogue entry for the series and the novels' paperback covers now claim Sue Barton as a contemporary young woman, poised for romance. Sue is, however, a pre-war heroine, and very much located within an American history and tradition of nursing. With her close contemporary, Cherry Ames, Sue Barton is one of the nursing heroines who were to establish a genre in popular fiction for young women, the career novel, and, more particularly, the nursing career novel.