The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.

The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.

The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism.
The Imaginary and Its Worlds: An Introduction - LITERARY IMAGINARIES - Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America - Ramon Saldivar - The Necessary Fragmentation of the (U.S.) Literary-Cultural Imaginary - Lawrence Buell - Imaginaries of American Modernism - Heinz Ickstadt - SOCIAL IMAGINARIES - William James versus Charles Taylor: Philosophy of Religion and the Confines of the Social and Cultural Imaginaries - Herwig Friedl - The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community: A Perspective of Figurational Sociology on the Cultural Imaginary - Christa Buschendorf - Russia's Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman's Pacific - Lene Johannessen - Form Games: Staging Life in the Systems Epoch - Mark Seltzer - POLITICAL IMAGINARIES - Real Toads - Walter Benn Michaels - Obama Unwound: The Romanticism of Victory and the Defeat of Compromise - Christopher Newfield - Barack Obama's Orphic Mysteries - Donald E. Pease - Coda. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer - Winfried Fluck - Contributors - Index

'Romance with America?' is a collection of twenty-one essays by one of today's most important American Studies scholars. The selection assembled here pays tribute to the immense scope of Winfried Fluck's intellectual pursuits. It traces nearly four decades of continuous engagement with a set of key problems, among them the cultural functions of fiction and the imaginary, their manifestations in different periods of American literary and cultural history, the role of aesthetic experience in the construction of national and individual identities, as well as the state of American Studies and its competing narratives about America. Throughout these essays, several of them previously unpublished or not yet published in English, the author unfolds a comprehensive cultural theory that reaches well beyond the study of 'America.'