The Fiction of America: Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film

The Fiction of America juxtaposes classic literature of the American Renaissance with twentieth-century popular culture—pairing, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Finding Nemo, Walt Whitman with Spiderman, and Hester Prynne with Madonna—to investigate how the “Americanness” of American culture constitutes itself in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance. Conceptualizing “America” as a transhistorical practice, Susanne Hamscha reveals disruptive, spectral moments in the narrative of “America,” which confront American culture with its inherent inconsistencies.