A01=Sean McCann
Activism
African Americans
Ambivalence
Author_Sean McCann
Awareness
Ayn Rand
Call It Sleep
Career
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Category=JPHL
Citizenship
Containment
Deference
Demagogue
Democracy
Determination
Disenchantment
Eloquence
Enthusiasm
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Gertrude Stein
Grandiosity
Great power
Great Society
Greatness
Herod the Great
Ideology
Imperialism
Individualism
Institution
Intellectual
Literature
Loyalty
Malcolm Cowley
Memoir
Mr.
Multitude
Narration
Narrative
National identity
Nationalism
Native Son
Patriotism
Peroration
Personhood
Pity
Political philosophy
Politician
Politics
Popular sovereignty
Progressive Era
Progressivism
Racism
Reactionary
Reformism
Rhetoric
Rugged individualism
Salinger
Self-determination
Sensibility
Sentimentality
Sophistication
Sovereignty
Suggestion
Symbolic power
The Erotic
The Making of Americans
The Public Interest
The Various
Venality
Vladimir Nabokov
Westphalian sovereignty
Woodrow Wilson
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691136950
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 26 Oct 2008
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less profound an impact on American fiction. A Pinnacle of Feeling is the first book to examine twentieth-century literature's deep fascination with the modern presidency and with the ideas about the relationship between state power and democracy that underwrote the rise of presidential authority. Sean McCann challenges prevailing critical interpretations through revelatory new readings of major writers, including Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth. He argues that these writers not only represented or satirized presidents, but echoed political thinkers who cast the chief executive as the agent of the sovereign will of the American people. They viewed the president as ideally a national redeemer, and they took that ideal as a model and rival for their own work.
A Pinnacle of Feeling illuminates the fundamental concern with democratic sovereignty that informs the most innovative literary works of the twentieth century, and shows how these works helped redefine and elevate the role of executive power in American culture.
Sean McCann is professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of "Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism".
