The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream

Author: Robert C. Hauhart

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 1000781569

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The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume. The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America. Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.


The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream

Author: Robert C. Hauhart

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1000385523

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What do we mean by the American dream? Can we define it? Or does any discussion of the phrase end inconclusively, the solid turned liquid—like ice melting? Do we know whether the American dream motivates and inspires or, alternately, obscures and deceives? The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream offers distinctive, authoritative, original essays by well-known scholars that address the social, economic, historical, philosophic, legal, and cultural dimensions of the American dream for the twenty-first century. The American dream, first discussed and defined in print by James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America (1931), has become nearly synonymous with being American. Adams’s definition, although known to scholars, is often lost in our ubiquitous use of the term. When used today, the iconic phrase seems to encapsulate every fashion, fad, trend, association, or image the user identifies with the United States or American life. The American dream’s ubiquity, though, argues eloquently for a deeper understanding of its heritage, its implications, and its impact—to be found in this first research handbook ever published on the topic.


The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream

Author: Robert C. Hauhart

Publisher: Routledge International Handbooks

Published: 2022-11-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781032352961

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The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume.


The Routledge Handbook of Rhetoric and Power

The Routledge Handbook of Rhetoric and Power

Author: Nathan Crick

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-04

Total Pages: 626

ISBN-13: 1040130100

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This handbook represents the first comprehensive disciplinary investigation into the relationship between rhetoric and power as it is expressed in different aspects of society. Providing conceptual and empirical foundations for the study of the relationship between different forms of rhetorical expression and diverse structures, practices, habits, and networks of power, The Routledge Handbook of Rhetoric and Power is divided into six parts: Theoretical Foundations Propaganda, Politics, and the State Resistance and Social Movements Culture, Society, and Identity Discourses of Technique and Organization Prospects for the Future The guiding principle of this handbook is that power represents a capacity for coordinated action grounded in specific historical, technological, political, and economic conditions. It suggests that rhetoric is an art that adapts to these conditions and finds ways to transform, create, or undermine these capacities in other people through self-conscious persuasion. Featuring contributions from key scholars, this accessibly written handbook will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students in the fields of rhetoric, writing studies, communication studies, political communication, and social justice.


The Real American Dream

The Real American Dream

Author: Andrew Delbanco

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 0674034163

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Since we discovered that, in Tocqueville’s words, “the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the heart,” how have we Americans made do? In The Real American Dream one of the nation’s premier literary scholars searches out the symbols and stories by which Americans have reached for something beyond worldly desire. A spiritual history ranging from the first English settlements to the present day, the book is also a lively, deeply learned meditation on hope. Andrew Delbanco tells of the stringent God of Protestant Christianity, who exerted immense force over the language, institutions, and customs of the culture for nearly 200 years. He describes the falling away of this God and the rise of the idea of a sacred nation-state. And, finally, he speaks of our own moment, when symbols of nationalism are in decline, leaving us with nothing to satisfy the longing for transcendence once sustained by God and nation. From the Christian story that expressed the earliest Puritan yearnings to New Age spirituality, apocalyptic environmentalism, and the multicultural search for ancestral roots that divert our own, The Real American Dream evokes the tidal rhythm of American history. It shows how Americans have organized their days and ordered their lives—and ultimately created a culture—to make sense of the pain, desire, pleasure, and fear that are the stuff of human experience. In a time of cultural crisis, when the old stories seem to be faltering, this book offers a lesson in the painstaking remaking of the American dream.


The American Dream

The American Dream

Author: Cal Jillson

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2016-11-18

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0700623108

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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: these words have long represented the promise of America, a “shimmering vision of a fruitful country open to all who come, learn, work, save, invest, and play by the rules.” In 2004, Cal Jillson took stock of this vision and showed how the nation’s politicians deployed the American Dream, both in campaigns and governance, to hold the American people to their program. “Full of startling ideas that make sense,” NPR's senior correspondent Juan Williams remarked, Jillson's book offered the fullest exploration yet of the origins and evolution of the ideal that serves as the foundation of our national ethos and collective self-image. Nonetheless, in the dozen years since Pursuing the American Dream was published, the American Dream has fared poorly. The decline of social mobility and the rise of income inequality—to say nothing of the extraordinary social, political, and economic developments of the Bush and Obama presidencies—have convinced many that the American Dream is no more. This is the concern that Jillson addresses in his new book, The American Dream: In History, Politics, and Fiction, which juxtaposes the claims of political, social, and economic elite against the view of American life consistently offered in our national literature. Our great novelists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and beyond highlight the limits and challenges of life—the difficulty if not impossibility of the dream—especially for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as well as women. His book takes us through the changing meaning and reality of the American Dream, from the seventeenth century to the present day, revealing a distinct, sustained separation between literary and political elite. The American Dream, Jillson suggests, took shape early in our national experience and defined the nation throughout its growth and development, yet it has always been challenged, even rejected, in our most celebrated literature. This is no different in our day, when what we believe about the American Dream reveals as much about its limits as its possibilities.


The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature

Author: Lokangaka Losambe

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-16

Total Pages: 591

ISBN-13: 1040013988

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The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.