European Perspectives on the United States – serie

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Silent Film recalibrates the celebrated author’s early career and brings fresh understanding to the life of one of America’s truly great literary figures. Scholars have previously focused on Fitzgerald’s connection with Hollywood when he worked in Tinseltown as a screenwriter in the 1930s. However, this ground-breaking research reveals the key role that Silent Hollywood played in establishing Fitzgerald’s burgeoning reputation in the early to mid-1920s. Vividly written and drawing on a wealth of new sources, this book documents Martina Mastandrea’s exciting discovery of the first film ever adapted from a work by Fitzgerald.

Up in Arms provides an illustrative and timely window onto the ways in which guns shape people’s lives and social relations in Texas. With a long history of myth, lore, and imaginaries attached to gun carrying, the Lone Star State exemplifies how various groups of people at different historical moments make sense of gun culture in light of legislation, political agendas, and community building. Beyond gun rights, restrictions, or the actual functions of firearms, the book demonstrates how the gun question itself becomes loaded with symbolic firepower, making or breaking assumptions about identities, behavior, and belief systems. Contributors include: Benita Heiskanen, Albion M. Butters, Pekka M. Kolehmainen, Laura Hernández-Ehrisman, Lotta Kähkönen, Mila Seppälä, and Juha A. Vuori.

Already in 1854, Henry David Thoreau had declared in Walden that “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is” (225). Like Thoreau, many other renowned American writers have considered what houses are and, particularly, what houses do, and they have created fictional dwellings that function not only as settings, but as actual central characters in their works. The volume is specifically concerned with the structure, the organization, and the objects inside houses, and argues that the space defined by rooms and their contents influences the consciousness, the imaginations, and the experiences of the humans who inhabit them.Winner of the Spanish Association for American Studies’ Javier Coy Award 2022 for best edited volume.Contributors are: Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Rodrigo Andrés, Vicent Cucarella-Ramon, Arturo Corujo, Mar Gallego, Ian Green, Michael Jonik, Wyn Kelley, Cynthia Lytle, Carme Manuel, Paula Martín-Salván, Elena Ortells, Eva Puyuelo-Ureña, Dolores Resano, and Cynthia Stretch.

Abolitionist Cosmopolitanism redefines the potential of American antislavery literature as a cultural and political imaginary by situating antislavery literature in specific transnational contexts and highlighting the role of women as producers, subjects, and audiences of antislavery literature. Pia Wiegmink draws attention to locales, authors, and webs of entanglement between texts, ideas, and people. Perceived through the lens of gender and transnationalism, American antislavery literature emerges as a body of writing that presents profoundly reconfigured literary imaginations of freedom and equality in the United States prior to the Civil War.

Often identified as one of the most genuine and enduring American film genres, the road movie has never been explored in the context of experimental filmmaking. To fill this gap, Lost Highways, Embodied Travels provides the first book-length study of over eighty unique and often obscure films and videos and situates them within the corporeal turn in American avant-garde cinema, so far mostly associated with body genres and sexually explicit films. Drawing on unpublished archival materials, the book offers a fresh take on both past and current practices of the experimental film community for scholars, students, makers and film buffs.

From the French origin of Coca-Cola to McDonald’s sponsorship of the 2015 Milan Expo, the book presents the first comparative history of these multinational corporations in two Western European countries, addressing some compelling questions: to what extent our increasingly globalized world is persistently shaped by forms of American hegemony, and what are some of the forces that have been most effective at challenging the relationship between Americanization and globalization? Through the local history of global companies, the book tells a new story about not only the influence of American businesses in Europe but also the influence of European governments and societies on those American businesses and their adaptability.

The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture examines the gothic mode deployed in a variety of texts that touch upon inherently US American themes, demonstrating its versatility and ubiquity across genres and popular media. The volume is divided into four main thematic sections, spanning representations related to ethnic minorities, bodily monstrosity, environmental anxieties, and haunted technology. The chapters explore both overtly gothic texts and pop culture artifacts that, despite not being widely considered strictly so, rely on gothic strategies and narrative devices.

This book presents papers by eleven European scholars that explore the ambivalent representations of an American West that follows “no single trajectory, creating instead a series of lines and rhythms, always moving, crossing, and folding” (Neil Campbell).The papers explore the use of the American West as an ideal or a realistic setting in different cultural productions, ranging from music (“Sing-along Melodies of the West”) to film (“Western Images in Motion”) or comics (“Graphic Representations of the American West”), and including popular cultural fields like podcasts, fashion, and gastronomy (“Performing the West”).