Publisher's Synopsis
For all outsiders, the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA was a signal that this strange land had descended into Big Bizarre. Nothing was normal anymore. Alt-facts and fake news blurred all cultural landmarks, and without facts, judging anything is impossible. The American light on the hill is now unrecognizable. This book consists of a series of essays on important works of American literature expanding into the visual media, and is predicated on the idea that the literary Canon is the National Gallery of Culture which describes the founding standards and how they have changed over two centuries to arrive at the America we see today. Two other works from across the Atlantic are also included because of their intense relevance. These essays draw out the consistent threads that explain this group of people who are dominant in the world media, continuously throwing up conflicting moral and social standards to the consternation of outsiders. The contents include: ForewordThe Puritan Base and Nathaniel HawthorneThe Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorn - 1850Moby Dick - Herman Melville - 1851Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser - 1900Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis - 1922The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - 1926A Matter of LibertyAnthem - Ayn Rand - 1937The Descent into the BizarreHenderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow - 1959Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - 1961Dr Strangelove - Peter George - 1963Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut - 1963Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson - 1973Dogville - A film by Lars von Trier - 2003Dude, Where's My Car - Screenplay Philip Stark - 2001That Statue of LibertyNew York - October 2018Most of the writers selected had close links to New York, and a visit to New York with all these writers in attendance explained links back into the layers of the past. It is the literary past that explains America's attitudes to important social issues. For the author the literature of a place is the key of understanding it. It traces social change in an artistic way that historians fail to see and gives some indication of how we arrived at this bizarre America of today. This is a book of American books, an outsider's point of view
