There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than
the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less
profound an impact on American fiction. "A Pinnacle of Feeling" is
the first book to examine twentieth-century literature's deep
fascination with the modern presidency and with the ideas about the
relationship between state power and democracy that underwrote the
rise of presidential authority.
Sean McCann challenges prevailing critical interpretations
through revelatory new readings of major writers, including Richard
Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul
Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth.
He argues that these writers not only represented or satirized
presidents, but echoed political thinkers who cast the chief
executive as the agent of the sovereign will of the American
people. They viewed the president as ideally a national redeemer,
and they took that ideal as a model and rival for their own
work.
"A Pinnacle of Feeling" illuminates the fundamental concern with
democratic sovereignty that informs the most innovative literary
works of the twentieth century, and shows how these works helped
redefine and elevate the role of executive power in American
culture.
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