Description
Book SynopsisThere 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. This book illuminates the fundamental concern with democratic sovereignty that informs the literary works of the twentieth century.
Trade Review"McCann identifies how ambitions for the executive branch of the US government informed the 20th-century novel... Few presidents appear as literary protagonists in their own right. Instead, their position serves as an ethical benchmark--whether as an authoritarian father figure, a career goal or even the target of an assassination attempt. If this symbolic use of public office threatens to rework the presidency as a chimerical, ghostly presence in the American novel, McCann carefully rebuilds these vague impressions to illustrate how authors reimagined the issue of popular sovereignty. His key argument gains momentum by describing how the ongoing debates over the boundaries of presidential government found close literary parallels. The arguments in political science monographs and middlebrow, social forecasting non-fiction are shown as the logical counterpart to imaginative representations of government institutions."--Graham Barnfield, Times Higher Education "[T]his book stands as an inventive, somewhat original brand of literary criticism."--B. Wallenstein, Choice "It is a tribute to McCann's superb book--one of the best I have read in the past five years--that his sharp description of the Republican project is a mere side-light, not central to his concerns or his thesis. McCann's scholarship, his knowledge of American history and the debates throughout that history about presidential power, his powers of exact description, and his probing analysis of the fundamental tensions in American democracy combine to make [other's] perfectly honorable books look rather pedestrian."--John McGowan, American Literary History
Table of ContentsPREFACE ix INTRODUCTION: "The Executive Disease": Presidential Power and Literary Imagination 1 CHAPTER ONE: Masters of Their Constitution: Gertrude Stein and the Promise of Progressive Leadership 33 CHAPTER TWO: Governable Beasts: Hurston, Roth, and the New Deal 67 CHAPTER THREE: The Myth of the Public Interest: Pluralism and Presidentialism in the Fifties 100 CHAPTER FOUR: Come Home, America: Vietnam and the End of the Progressive Presidency 139 EPILOGUE: Philip Roth and the Waning and Waxing of Political Time 178 Notes 197 Index 243
