The Presidents of American Fiction

Description

The Presidents of American Fiction brings together American literature, history, and political science to explore the most influential fictionalized accounts of the presidency from the early 19th century to the time of Trump. Of late, popular understandings of the presidency are being radically re-written-consider, for example, the distinctive myths that accompanied the ascent of the Obama and Trump administrations-and many readers of all stripes are radically reimagining the office and its holder. Placing these changes within a broader cultural context, Michael J. Blouin investigates narratives involving fictional presidents, from the supposedly factual to the outright fantastical, within their distinct literary and historical moments.
The author considers representative texts including works penned by James Fenimore Cooper from the Jacksonian moment, Gore Vidal in the age of Nixon and Vietnam, and Philip Roth in the neoliberal period. Through detailed readings that question how American presidents function as characters within the popular imagination, this book examines the presidency as a complex, ever-evolving trope, and in so doing enhances our appreciation of American literature’s inextricable link with American politics.

Michael J. Blouin is Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Milligan University, USA, where he co-founded and now directs the Honors Program. He is the author of Stephen King and American Politics (2021) and Mass-Market Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, 1972 – 2017 (2018).

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Moving Portraits of the President
1. James Fenimore Cooper’s Exceptional Presidents
2. George Lippard and the Gothic President
3. Williams Wells Brown and the Disembodied President
4. The President in Books for Boys
5. The President in Books for Girls
6. Hamlin Garland, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Tortured Heart of American Realism
7. Gore Vidal and the Performative Presidency
8. The Imperial Presidents of American Literature
Epilogue: George Saunders and Presidential Melancholia
ReferencesIndex

“Michael Blouin has written a truly remarkable, and remarkably important, study of the American presidency here, treating major representations of the chief executive in works of fiction over nearly two centuries but looking beyond these visions as well. He takes into account the notion of ‘presidentialism’ itself, inviting us to see the office itself as a kind of necessary fiction, one that functions oddly in a supposedly democratic nation. Blouin’s book is, I think, a hugely interesting and important contribution to the aesthetics of politics, and it sheds light on how we live our corporate lives – not something one often sees in an academic study. This book deserves a wide and appreciative audience.” —Jay Parini, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Middlebury College, USA, and author Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal (2016) and Borges and Me (2021)“In this wide-ranging analysis of fictional US presidents, Michael Blouin shows how literary authors-highbrow and low-have countered the gravitational force of US presidentialism. The Fictional POTUS lets readers focus and practice their desires for US democracy on historical and imagined presidents in ways that, as he urges, are good for democracy. Literary presidents serve as a ‘vital catalyst that reminds readers of their dissatisfaction’ with presidential failures and democratic shortcomings, letting them practice wanting more and imagining better. The fictional POTUS teaches readers that ‘dissatisfaction [is] one of democracy’s greatest gifts’ thus serving as a powerful corrective to the anti-democratic symbolics and practices of the US presidency.” —Dana D. Nelson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair of English and American Studies, Vanderbilt University, USA“A remarkable achievement, this investigation into Presidentialism – both as an actual figure and idea – is a more than timely reminder of the schisms that persist at the heart of American democracy. This is an important study of some of the fictions that American presidents have both engendered and capitalized on throughout history; in other words, a must read for serious students of American cultural history, literature, and politics.” —Caroline Blinder, Reader in American Literature and Culture, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Additional information