Description
Book SynopsisUtopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump:Images from Literature and Visual Arts treats literature, film, television series, and comic books dealing with utopian and dystopian worlds reflecting on or anticipating our current age. From Henry James’s dreamlike utopia of “The Great Good Place” to the psychotic world of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, from science fiction and recent horror films, television adaptations of books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and new series such as Black Mirror to the repressive Hitlerian dystopia of Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, the contributors examine the development of scenarios that either prefigure the rise of individuals such as Donald J. Trump or suggest alternatives to them. Ultimately, one might say of the worlds presented here, viewed from different social and political perspectives: one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia.
This is the fifth in a series of books edited by Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan, and published by Rowman & Littlefield with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic (both in 2013) focused on the vampire legend in traditional and modern thought. The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016) examined a range of supernatural beings in literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. Apocalyptic Chic: Visions of the Apocalypse and Post-Apocalypse in Literature and Visual Arts (2017) dealt with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times, and from peoples and cultures around the world.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Barbara Brodman and James E Doan
Chapter One — Getting Off: Henry James and Writing Utopia
Dan M. R. Abitz
Chapter Two — Poison in the Ear: Lessons of Literary Alt-Narratives for the Trump Era
Christine Jackson
Chapter Three — The Search for Sustainability Transitions in Science Fiction Futures
Jeffrey Barber
Chapter Four — Resurrecting and Adapting A Wrinkle in Time in the Age of Trump
Emily A. O’Dell
Chapter Five — The Medium is the Massacre: Deceit, Desire, and Patrick Bateman’s Trumpian Dystopia
Daniel Adleman
Chapter Six — “Horror Movies are Already Telling the Story” …of Trump’s America
Todd K. Platts and Kibiriti Majuto
Chapter Seven — Beautiful and Damned: Tech Noir, Neoplatonism, and Existential Crises in Bladerunner 2049
Sue Matheson
Chapter Eight — Feminism-Reboot in Mad Max, Fury Road and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Kate Waites
Chapter Nine — Architectures of Ustopia: CDMX as Setting and Character in Mischa Rozema’s Short Film Sundays
Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández and Claudia Schaefer
Chapter Ten — X-Men Saga and the Dystopian “Otherness”: Race, Identity, Repression and Inclusiveness in the Mutant World
Elisabetta Di Minico
Chapter Eleven — Hang the DJ: Black Mirror in the Age of Trump
Matthew Paproth
Chapter Twelve — Through the Eyes of the Wardens: Judge Dredd under the Shadow of Trump
Tom Shapira
Chapter Thirteen — Grab ’em by the Seeds: The Regressive Utopianism of Trumpism in Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night
Ryan Farrar
Chapter Fourteen — Diverse New World
David L. McNaron
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors
