The American Dream Reconsidered addresses readers of Shakespearean and American literature alike. This study aims to re-position William Shakespeare's The Tempest in world literature, using and re-interpreting Leo Marx's thesis that The Tempest may be considered "a prologue to American literature." Focusing on The Tempest in the first half of her work, the author points out novel aspects of the play that may be connected to the European experience of the New World, prefiguring even the concept of the later American dream. The chapters that follow the analysis of the Shakespearean play take a glimpse at American literary history and outline how the previously examined three major components-time, nature and magic-appear in the American literary heritage up to the present. The examples presented are by authors from Washington Irving to Sandra Cisneros, and include a profound analysis of Linda Hogan's Power, the novel that, as Limpr argues, indicates the start of a new process in American literature by opposing the intense myth destruction of the past two centuries and re-creating the myth.

As monster theory highlights, monsters are cultural symbols, guarding the borders that society creates to protect its values and norms. Adolescence is the time when one explores and aims at crossing borders to learn the rules of the culture that one will fit into as an adult. Exploring the roles of monsters in coming-of-age narratives and the need to confront and understand the monstrous, this work explores recent developments in the presentation of monsters--such as the vampire, the zombie, and the man-made monster--in maturation narratives, then moves on to discuss monsters inhabiting the psychic landscapes of child characters. Finally, it touches on monsters in science fiction, in which facing the monstrous is a variation of the New World narrative. Discussions of novels by M. R. Carey, Suzanne Collins, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Daryl Gregory, Sarah Maria Griffin, Seanan McGuire, Stephenie Meyer, Patrick Ness, and Jon Skovron are complemented by analysis of television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Westworld.