Today the United States is a country divided along lines of gender, economic inequality, educational level, and political affiliation. Democrats typically select a different range of matters of serious public concern compared to Republicans. Many Americans describe difficulty in coming to terms with the demands placed on them in their work, communities, and personal lives and achieving satisfaction. The institutional crises that pervade our politics, economy, educational systems, and communities have inspired a contemporary crisis: a widespread inability for many to live as integrated, effective selves in the twenty-first century United States. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary research, The Lonely Quest explores the dilemma of constructing the self in the U.S. today.

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume. The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America. Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

Historically, the United States has been viewed by generations of immigrants as the land of opportunity, where through hard work one can prosper and make a better life. The American Dream is perhaps the United States' most common export. For many Americans, though, questions remain about whether the American Dream can be achieved in the twenty-first century. Americans, faced with global competition and increased social complexity, wonder whether their dwindling natural resources, polarized national and local politics, and often unregulated capitalism can support the American Dream today. This book examines the ideas and experiences that have formed the American Dream, assesses its meaning for Americans, and evaluates its prospects for the future.

Historically, the United States has been viewed by generations of immigrants as the land of opportunity, where through hard work one can prosper and make a better life. The American Dream is perhaps the United States' most common export. For many Americans, though, questions remain about whether the American Dream can be achieved in the twenty-first century. Americans, faced with global competition and increased social complexity, wonder whether their dwindling natural resources, polarized national and local politics, and often unregulated capitalism can support the American Dream today. This book examines the ideas and experiences that have formed the American Dream, assesses its meaning for Americans, and evaluates its prospects for the future.

Today the United States is a country divided along lines of gender, economic inequality, educational level, and political affiliation. Democrats typically select a different range of matters of serious public concern compared to Republicans. Many Americans describe difficulty in coming to terms with the demands placed on them in their work, communities, and personal lives and achieving satisfaction. The institutional crises that pervade our politics, economy, educational systems, and communities have inspired a contemporary crisis: a widespread inability for many to live as integrated, effective selves in the twenty-first century United States. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary research, The Lonely Quest explores the dilemma of constructing the self in the U.S. today.

In Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story, editors Robert C. Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein have assembled a collection of eighteen original essays written by literary critics from around the globe. Collectively, these critics argue that the reciprocal influence between Russian and American writers is integral to the development of the short story in each country as well as vital to the global status the contemporary short story has attained. This collection provides original analyses of both well-known Russian and American stories as well as some that might be more unfamiliar. Each essay is purposely crafted to display an appreciation of the techniques, subject matter, themes, and approaches that both Russian and American short story writers explored across borders and time. Stories by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Krzhizhanovsky as well as short stories by Washington Irving, Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ursula Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates populate this essential, multivalent collection. Perhaps more important now than at any time since the end of the Cold War, these essays will remind readers how much Russian and American culture share, as well as the extent to which their respective literatures are deeply intertwined.

European Writers in Exile collects a series of original essays that address the writers' universal existential dilemma, when viewed through the lens of exile: who am I, where am I from, and what do I write, and to whom? While we often understand the term "exile" to refer to writers who have either been forced to leave their home country or region or chosen self-exile, this term need not be defined so narrowly, and the contributors to this volume explore a range of interesting and evolving definitions. Various countries in Europe have long been both a refuge for people and writers from many countries and a strife-torn region which has forced many to flee within the continent or beyond it. The phrase "in exile" involves writers moving across borders in multiple directions and for multiple reasons, including for reasons of duress or personal quest, and these themes are addressed and critiqued in these essays. This volume naturally examines the cataclysmic and near-universal exilic experiences relating to the world wars, including essays on Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Additionally, essays address the unique early twentieth-century experiences of Emile Zola, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce. More contemporary essay subjects include Milan Kundera, Norman Manea, Eva Hoffman, Caryl Phillips, and W. G. Sebald. This collection of transnational, globalized European literature studies envisions understanding the intersection of our contemporary world and various writers in exile in new cultural, historical, spatial, and epistemological frameworks. How does literary production in an increasingly globalized world-when seen from exile-affect a view back towards a country or region left behind? Or, conversely, how does exile push a writer to look outward to new (trans-)nationalized space(s)? These and other questions are important to investigate. Taken in sum, European Writers in Exile offers an academically rigorous, important, and cohesive volume.