Between 1976 and 1979 Byron Preiss operated as a book packager specializing in graphic novels, bringing comics creators together on original stories and licensed properties and delivering the finished product to publishing houses. Far from being praised for his efforts, Preiss was attacked by fans and comics professionals for betraying the very medium he professed to uplift. This article explains the industrial shifts behind the rise of Byron Preiss Visual Publications and book-format comics, as well as accounting for the hostility directed against Preiss, a level of vitriol that increased after his collaborators on Empire (1978) expressed their dismay at the changes he made to the graphic novel before publication.

This essay examines detective fiction that takes New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina as setting and theme. It explores the ways in which stories told in novels and prime-time TV shows across the interlocking genres of police procedural and crime thriller have steered a sensationalist course through the recovery of the city over the last five years. It considers the role and representation of the New Orleans Police Department in particular, and of law enforcement officials more broadly, as post-Katrina protagonists who protect and serve the city, a rejoinder to media-made myths according to which they deserted their posts in the days after the storm. It closes with a case study of FOX TV's K-Ville, the first television series to depict New Orleans post-Katrina in a sustained way, and investigates the extent to which it was judged harshly for translating the disaster into a formulaic cop show. Deep-seated assumptions about genre, narrative form, the burden of representation and popular ideas about this particular locale inform the reception of these genre fictions.

Early in the Great Depression, Gerald W. Johnson remarked on the “fathomless pessimism” that had overtaken the American People: “The energy of the country has suffered a strange paralysis … We are in the doldrums, waiting not even hopefully for the wind which never comes.” Film developments of the decade were entwined with the ongoing economic crisis. This article offers an analysis of the extreme shifts in confidence in this period and argues for their relationship with the evolution of film noir, which had its roots in two film genres prominent in the period, the gangster and fallen-woman films, but which breaks with these genres, not after the onset of World War II, which has long been believed, but in the closing years of the 1930s.

This essay will discuss corporeal and racial representation in the work of John Gregory Brown, a little-known, yet immensely rewarding, New Orleans novelist. Placing the discussion within the rich literary tradition of the American South, I will focus on the male protagonists of his first two novels – Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994) and The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur (1996) – and examine why Brown's characters constantly shift between different racial positions, and how notions such as racial purity or fixed subjectivity are exposed and interrogated. My analysis will also address physical defect, and explore how Brown destabilizes the ideal of the body as a privileged locus of authoritative wholeness. I will be arguing that, as a cultural and racial signifier, the body in Brown's work is linked with fluidity and fragmentation, and that the boundaries between whiteness and blackness are continuously reshaped by the characters' ambiguous perceptions of themselves as subversive, multi-racial subjects. The conclusion will maintain that both novels offer new insights into the interaction between corporeal representation and racial identity, which make an important contribution to the tradition of American and, particularly, southern literature.

This study attempts to find out the reasons for the emergence of blogging in the contemporary media scene and for its widespread acceptance. First, it delineates the various events that contributed to the notoriety of political blogs. In a second stage, it traces the origins of contemporary blogging back to the history of early journalistic forms, from the penny press to the muckraking movement. After identifying the characteristics linking blogs to the American journalistic tradition, it focusses on what differentiates blogging from other forms of journalistic writing.

Mobility is a significant feature of American history and culture. This is reflected in the literature and cinema of the road genre, in influential novels such as Jack Kerouac's On the Road and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and in films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). However, when non-Americans create road stories they tend to employ symbols and narratives that are often considered intrinsically American. These storytellers appear to have absorbed or internalized aspects of American national identity, and this is reflected in their work. This is demonstrated in The Cursed Earth, an apocalyptic road story in twenty-five parts, which was published in the British weekly comic 2000AD from May to October 1978. Written by British writer Pat Mills, with contributions from John Wagner and Chris Lowder, The Cursed Earth features the character Judge Dredd, perhaps the most popular and most recognizable icon of British comics of the last thirty years. Through close textual analysis of the Cursed Earth story, this article reveals how thematic elements of the road genre are linked to significant themes in American history and culture.

Korean War films from the US and South Korea provide one cultural site through which scholar–teachers working in American studies, and the humanities in general, can intervene in the unending Korean War. An emergent peace movement has organized around term unending Korean War in order to educate the public both about the history of the three-year period of active combat, and about the repercussions of the fact that the Armistice Agreement, signed on 27 July 1953, stopped the shooting but did not end the war. In the US context, the Korean War is described as a forgotten war. When the war is remembered, it has often been interpreted as a limited, defensive, or static war – a war fought in the trenches – a perspective that tends to occlude the air war. Through a comparative study of the Hollywood film The Bridges at Toko-Ri (Mark Robson, 1954) and the South Korean film Welcome to Dongmakgol (Park Kwang-hyun, 2005), I explore conflicting ways of representing and remembering the air war: as limited to an interdiction campaign in the former, as the cause of civilian casualties in the latter. The friction that results from viewing Welcome to Dongmakgol against the grain of The Bridges at Toko-Ri provides one starting point for a discussion of the unending Korean War, a discussion which has yet to appear in the field of transnational American studies. My hope is that greater understanding of the devastating air war can contribute to the struggle for peace on the Korean peninsula.

This article analyzes Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008), John Wells's Company Men (2011), and Lynn Nottage's Sweat (2015) to limn the place of manufacturing labor in recent US cultural memory. Timelines that focus on labor forms (i.e. “postindustrial”) often reproduce elements of the persistent US mythologizing of industrial labor's virtues. Nottage's and Rivera's works puncture this ideological figuration by showing the dangers and precarity of industrial work, while Company Men presents industrial labor as a means for masculine, moral renewal. I compare these takes on economic restructuring across the last several decades to scrutinize a crucial element of American self-mythologizing.

‘ The Black Cat ’ is one of Poe's neat little studies of obsession. Joseph Moldenhauer has said that these first-person tales of terror should be regarded less as studies of deranged minds than as controlled exercises in madness. We may take his point that there is little ‘ clinical ’ observation and that the obsession is seen from within, but may add further that the subjects of these tales are the irrational motives themselves, and therefore Poe does not need to create a motive for the motive. That is, ‘ The Black Cat ’ is a study of the ‘ murdering impulse ’ of the sort noted by Benjamin Rush in his Sixteen Lectures (1811) by whose account of a famous poisoner of cats it may have been suggested. It is not particularly a study of the effects of the ‘ murdering impulse ’ but rather of the impulse itself, which Poe simply cloaks in a non-specific narrator ‘ self ’. Poe's habitual use of the monologue or confessional form, and his claustrophobic interiors, are both calculated to produce a sense of internalized action, and the scenery of the tales is usually the chamber of the haunted mind, of which the poem ‘ The Haunted Palace ’ is only the most explicit version. The lack of a touchstone in ‘ real ’ surroundings, of an objective point of view, together with the sense of identification induced by first-person narration, combines to ensure that the internalized action is not seen from a position safely outside the distorted consciousness but, necessarily, from within.

This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new “American reality.” Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has “left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe,” a turn to fantasy that precedes the final irruption of a wealthy vulgarian who calls himself the Joker, and who subverts any previous sense of identity and of what is “real.” Drawing from the notion of national fantasy as argued by Lauren Berlant (1991), Jacqueline Rose (1996), and Donald Pease (2009), the article suggests that Rushdie's novel performs and invites a rare self-examination in the context of early literary responses to the rise of Trumpism.

In this essay I examine the importance of home within what Peter Brooks has called “the melodramatic imagination.” Arguing that nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama has a long afterlife, I examine the significance of John Howard Payne's song “Home Sweet Home” in two of D. W. Griffith's films, Home Sweet Home (1913) and The Birth of a Nation (1915). I show that home is elevated to a sacred site within melodrama and that, within Griffith's infamous 1915 film, this sacred site is a white southern home which he takes to represent the nation. Melodrama is an ethical drama in which virtue and vice face each other. Home, as a crucial element of melodrama, is often represented as its site of confrontation, indeed is often precisely what is at stake within such confrontations. Given the political potency of home in arguments about nation and identity, the confrontation between virtue and vice over home has powerful potential to articulate issues of belonging and exclusion, desire and longing. The intermingling of representations of home and melodrama, combined with the long afterlife of nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, makes understanding and scrutinizing these formations an important critical act.

Beltings and beatings play a prominent role in Twain's boy fictions. In “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” (1865), Jim is “always spanked…to sleep” by his mother and, instead of a good-night kiss, “she boxed his ears when she was ready to leave him.” While in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884–85), when Huck stays with pap in the cabin in the woods, “by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand it. I was all over welts.” It is the prevalence of such punishments, and attempted punishments, in Tom Sawyer's young life that provides the starting-point for my present analysis of childhood discipline and its fictional representation in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). For to focus on the different types of punishment Tom undergoes, the supervisory controls which are placed over him, and the way he responds to them, is to suggest a reading of Twain's novel as illustrative both of the changing forms of domestic discipline being introduced in America in the 1830s and 40s, and the spaces in which that discipline functions. In pursuing this line of inquiry, I build on previous work on the development of modern American social regulation in the antebellum period, and particularly that by G. M. Goshgarian and Richard H. Brodhead.

The arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955 provided the spark which ignited the long smouldering resentments of black Montgomerians. For 381 days they waged a boycott of the city bus lines, frustrating the opposition of white authorities and financially crippling the local transit company. More profoundly it resulted in a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public transportation. Equally momentous was the emergence of the man who would serve as the spiritual figurehead of the civil rights movement: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, one national black newspaper acclaimed King as “Alabama's Modern Moses.” Since the darkest days of slavery African-Americans had sought spiritual salvation by comparing their own condition to that of God's Chosen People, the Israelites of the Old Testament. Throughout their years of enslavement they prayed for the Moses who would deliver them from their suffering unto the Promised Land. During the boycott, the black citizens of Montgomery had similarly sustained their morale by singing the old slave spirituals, raising their voices at the nightly mass meetings in rousing renditions of “Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land.” “As sure as Moses got the children of Israel across the Red Sea,” King exhorted the black community, “we can stick together and win.” Others too drew the analogy between the historical experience of Jews and the contemporary predicament of African-Americans. Looking back on the boycott, white liberal activist Virginia Durr evoked the spectre of Nazi Germany in describing the strength of racist opposition.

Although Thomas Pynchon has continued to publish long after the postwar American countercultural era, his politics are critically characterized in relation to that movement's values. The dominant critical positions associate power with rationalism and functionality, and political opposition with creativity and pleasure, positioning Pynchon's novels at a politicized intersection between postmodernism and the counterculture. This article problematizes this dominant critical position, taking Mason & Dixon (1997) as exemplary of Pynchon's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes, and to developments in capitalist social organization in the 1980s.

This article argues that because a center–periphery model has dominated our understanding of postwar suburban growth we have failed to fully understand the rural dimensions of that growth. That misunderstanding resulted from the urban orientation of sociologists who studied the suburbs. As a consequence, we have also not appreciated the extent to which rural political outlooks shaped the postwar backlash against New Deal liberalism in the suburbs.

In 1969, a group of activists in the Netherlands formed the Solidariteitscomité met de Black Panthers, or Black Panther Solidarity Committee, intended to support the Black Panther Party through a platform of public education, fund-raising, and political protest. Their efforts were part of a broader campaign for European solidarity launched by the African Americans themselves earlier that year. This article is the first to explore how Dutch activists understood their transatlantic partnership with the Black Panthers, arguing that their solidarity served not only to support the party but also to challenge American imperialism and Dutch colonialism in new ways.

This article traces the changing terrain of the food stamp program in the pivotal decade of the 1970s. In 1969, President Richard Nixon promised to put an end to hunger in America, “for all time.” However, in the fifteen years following this announcement, policymakers erected boundaries around the scope of public food welfare programs. In this article, the author highlights key continuities between earlier, modest attempts at program reform under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter and the later Reagan-era assault on welfare spending of the early 1980s.