Stephen King and American Politics

(Paperback)

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Description

From The Long Walk to The Outsider, Stephen Kings prolific output reflects the major political concerns in America for the last fifty years. Stephen King and American Politics is the first sustained study of the complex ways in which Kings texts speak to their unique political moments. By exploring this aspect of the authors popular works, readers might better understand the numerous crises that Americans currently face. Surveying Kings corpus to address a wide range of issues, including the spread of late capitalism, the Bush-Cheney doctrine, and the chaos of the populist present. Although his fiction may outwardly declare itself to be anti-political, political energies persist between the lines. Given the possibility of a political resurgence that haunts so many of his page-turners, Stephen King produces horror and hope in equal measure.

Reviews

Stephen King and American Politics provides the key for unlocking the political importance of Stephen Kings fiction. Through Michael Blouins perceptive analysis, this ostensibly apolitical fiction becomes the site for a completely unforeseen form of fictional politics that embraces the impossibility of its aims. This groundbreaking new book shows the possibility for reconceiving the politics of aesthetics through attention to how Kings narratives deploy the variegations of desire.
-- Todd McGowan, University of Vermont, author of Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets
At a time when political partisanship has America in lockdown, Blouin argues the persistence of ambivalence in American culturehe conjures our usual demons and shows us how they refuse to be exorcised. This book is required reading not just for Stephen Kings politics, but for the contemporary Gothic altogether. -- Steven Bruhm, Western University
King studies has evolved into a field that grows ever more populated and sophisticated because of work by young scholars such as Blouin, who reminds us that over five decades Stephen King has become so much more than Americas horrormeister. With this book, Blouin enters into the highest echelon of Kings critical interpreters. -- Tony Magistrale, University of Vermont

Author Bio

Michael J. Blouin PhD is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Milligan College. His recent publications include Stephen King and American History, co-authored with Tony Magistrale (forthcoming).