This article examines the way in which three contemporary novelists have interpreted the proliferation of cults and other independent communities in the USA. Thomas Pynchon's Vineland is read as a critique of individualism that regrets the loss of collective identity and purpose. A subsequent reading of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love demonstrates the destructive consequences of individual submission that draws parallels between the dynamics of “cult” communities and mainstream society. This is developed further in a discussion of Don DeLillo's Mao II, which is represented as an attempt to reconcile libertarian and communitarian discourses, while remaining mindful of the dangers of both.

A unified Europe – the economic and political powerhouse of the world – looms just over the horizon. All that is lacking is a strong personality to galvanise and unify the various factions on the continent. And that person is coming!

Charles Dyer, World News and Bible Prophecy (1993, 206)

The subject of Europe, its history, politics, and integration, is an important area of study across a range of academic disciplines and professional spheres. Theorists and policy-makers alike have made European developments, particularly the elements of union, a key area of inquiry. This article seeks to explore a somewhat neglected field of analysis – the influence of religion in shaping understandings of Europe. In contrast to much work on Europe, my focus here is on the European perspective of a particular group of outsiders: conservative, premillennial Protestants in the United States.

As a publicly funded institution,The University of Texas at Austin had to implement the state's legislation to allow concealed handguns on campus. Yet its own Campus Carry policy has sought to erase the matter from everyday campus life. The administration deems it a “nonissue,” presuming that students have become accustomed to the idea, do not think about it actively, and have a low interest in acquiring a handgun license. This paper, based on a survey of the university's undergraduates, questions these ideas. It shows that a majority of students think that the issue is important and examines in what sense the students are troubled by its effects. While opinions differ between supporters and opponents of Campus Carry, divergences also exist within their ranks, such as among supporters of the law regarding where guns should specifically be allowed at the university. On the basis of the survey, the essay also examines how many licensed carriers are actually on campus, compared to the university's estimates.

There are plenty of texts in which one might not be surprised to find an alien invasion on only the second page, but The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (2010) – the seven-hundred-page document produced by the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission – is hardly one of them. The Inquiry Report opens by invoking the dizzying difficulty of its own task: from “millions of pages of documents,” the Inquiry Report begins by noting, its authors have attempted to understand events compared, just in the Inquiry Report's first two pages, to “mass delusion,” “a hurricane,” a “perfect storm,” a “train wreck,” and, finally, an “alien event.” This proliferation of metaphors suggests an encounter with a set of historical conditions whose magnitude and complexity render them recalcitrant to representation. What overwhelms the authors of the Inquiry Report is not simply the complexity – the length and breadth – of the story to be told, but the question of what sort of story it should be: if the crisis was described even by those who should have been in the know as “dramatic and mystifying,” how could one render it legible while at the same time doing justice to its singularity?

When you shake his hand, do you already know? Before you ask whether she has done anything political, can you guess in which party she would have done it? The political parties, even American political parties, are different. They offer different issue positions, on economic policy, on foreign policy, on social policy. They represent different interests as well, different classes, different regions, different ethnic and racial groups. Yet there is something else about these parties, something quite apart from issues and interests, which makes the direct observer believe that he can tell the Republicans from the Democrats, even when he is at the country club, or at the corner bar.

The town of Concord, Massachusetts, is widely celebrated in American culture as a pastoral place. It was the home of the Minutemen, the “embattled farmers” who fought the Redcoats at the Old North Bridge and launched the War for Independence. More than a half-century later, it became the bucolic center of the American Renaissance, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau waged their own revolutions of the spirit. In these terms, Concord readily plays its part within the longstanding American opposition between country and city, serving as the timeless small town, the symbolic guardian of that rural simplicity and love of liberty so regularly invoked in times of crisis to recall a complex urban-industrial nation to its roots. Even today, when the town numbers some 16,000 people, Concordians like to picture their community as a “climate for freedom.”

Giant is a sprawling narrative, centered around the Benedict family, Texas cattle ranchers, and Jett Rink, a nouveau riche oilman. Originally serialized in Ladies' Home Journal in 1952, subsequently published as a novel, then adapted into George Stevens's 1956 film starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor, Giant is a text that dramatizes the domestication and naturalization of the oil industry in the postwar United States while endorsing a multiracial vision of Texas. This essay explores how Giant ultimately arrives at nationalistic pluralism after representing the radical changes brought about by the modern oil industry in the US, particularly the erosion of traditional class divisions as Jett Rink's oil wealth exceeds the Benedict's ranching wealth. The subsumption of oil into liberal pluralism marks what this essay names “fossil-fuel futurity,” an ideological configuration in which normative life is produced through the commodities and modes of transportation made available by fossil-fuel culture. The essay then puts Giant into a broader context of narratives about oil in the postwar US, especially the television series Dallas (1978–91) and the film There Will Be Blood (2007). In all three texts, oil culture becomes postwar US culture, saturating aesthetic, affective, and family relations. The challenge for us, then, is to imagine a mode of futurity that does not replicate the ideological valences of “fossil-fuel futurity.”

Early on a December morning in 1848, long before anyone else stirred, two slaves, a man and woman, made their bid for freedom from a plantation, just outside Macon, Georgia. She, almost white, was dressed as a slave master, he as her valet. In four days they were in Philadelphia; three weeks later they moved to the safer city of Boston where they remained until the passing of the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill in September 1850 forced them to flee to England. Nineteen years were spent under the “ mane of the British lion ” free from the “ claws of the American eagle.” Finally, after the Civil War they returned as farmers to their native Georgia. Their bold odyssey in 1848 brought them fame and renown. It was a story of love, determination and resilience, the virtues of frontier America, conquering all odds. No other escape, with the possible exception of Frederick Douglass' and Josiah Henson's, created such a stir in ante-bellum America as did the Crafts'.

The American nation is presently caught in the throes of its third conservation movement. It is generally considered that the first American conservation movement in the United States took place during the period 1890–1920, with particular emphasis upon the first decade of the twentieth century, and the second was associated with the New Deal and subsequent policies of Franklin Roosevelt in the period 1933–43. The aim of this paper is to compare the development and the underlying philosophies of the present conservation movement in the United States with the growth and guiding principles of its two predecessors, and to follow this analysis through with a somewhat more normative examination of various implications for public policy which come to light.

I hope to redeem the banality of the second half of my title by immediately particularizing the modern self of which I speak. Forced into high heels, skirts, and corsets, women suffer what Veblen calls “mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work.” Writing eight years after Veblen, Henry James in The Amerian Scene, his account of his 1904 travels in America, finds that the American woman “in her manner of embodying or representing her sex” has become “a new human convenience, not unlike the ingenious mechanical appliances.” In 1947 in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer speak of the manner in which a teenage American girl keeps “the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the most intimate situation…” as bearing witness to “man's attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus…personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.” One thread connecting these images is the commodity status of women under late capitalism. All three moments can be said to register the depleted subjectivity of those who, in Adorno's words, “have escaped the sphere of production only to be absorbed all the more entirely by the sphere of consumption.” But this convergence should not obscure significant differences among all three writers, especially between Veblen on the one hand and James and Adorno on the other.

The publication of Toni Morrison's new novel Jazz with its insistent jazzy themes and rhythms will have concentrated the minds of critics on the relationship of her work to America's most important indigenous artistic form, jazz music. However, in their headlong rush to foreground the impact of jazz on Toni Morrison's latest novel critics should be wary of isolating this novel as her only jazz-influenced work. All of her novels have been informed by the rhythms and cadences of a black musical tradition and in this article I want to stress the centrality of jazz music stylistically to her whole corpus of work. Morrison herself has acknowledged the centrality of a musical aesthetic to her work in interview after interview long before the publication of Jazz:

…a novel written a certain way can do precisely what spirituals used to do. It can do exactly what blues or jazz or gossip or stories or myths or folklore did – that stuff which was a common wellspring of ideas…

Morrison is writing out of an oral tradition which foregrounds musical performances as well as other oral forms. Some critics have acknowledged the importance of jazz to her work, notably Anthony J. Berret in his article “Toni Morrison's Literary Jazz”. But, despite some provocative and illuminating comments, his is not a systematic account of the use of a jazz mode in Morrison's fiction and I wish in this paper to attempt a more rigorous analysis of her early novels, outlining her willed use of a jazz aesthetic as a pivotal structural device.

This special issue advances the first comprehensive account of “oil culture,” the broad field of cultural representations and symbolic forms that have taken shape around the fugacious material of oil in the 150 years since the inception of the US petroleum industry. Exploring the cultural life of oil from a variety of methodological perspectives, the essays in this special issue seek to elucidate the complex role that imaginative representations have played in establishing and contesting oil's status as the primary commodity underpinning modern economic expansion and a fundamental ontological construct shaping social and political life in the United States and beyond. By addressing the rise of oil as a cultural problem, this issue aims to fill a significant gap in oil scholarship and to intervene in what has become an epochal and highly charged moment in the history of petro-capitalism.

When published in July 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report surprised readers with its accessible prose and narrative power. The report won the respect of the American public as much for its literary qualities as for the findings of the 9/11 commissioners. This article argues that the success of the 9/11 Report depended on its ability to challenge literary classification, and to bring down the walls between personal and national experience. More effectively than any other literary work of its era, the 9/11 Report wed the fortunes of a weakened American government to those of a wounded citizenry.

This article examines the representation of intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel Middlesex. It situates the depiction of intersexuality within the context of current scholarship on sexed identity within the field of gender and sexuality studies. It argues that while a fictional focus on ambiguously sexed identity might appear to be aligned with queer critiques of fixed categories of “sex,” Eugenides's narrative remains implicated in heteronormative assumptions. More specifically, it will explore the narrative strategies which frame Calliope Stephanides's intersexed body, focussing on the relationship between the male-identified adult Cal, “author” of this fictional autobiography, and his remembered teenage girl self. It will suggest that the retrospective logic at work in this narrative is complicit in a heteronormative temporality which reinforces the causal relationship between sex, gender and sexuality which queer theorists have sought to interrogate.

One would expect from the relatively sophisticated industrial society into which Britain had developed by the 1860s a complex reaction to the immense crisis which struck the United States in that decade, euphemistically described in the British press as ‘the American Difficulty’. The enormous heterogeneity of economic, ideological, political and group interests involved in the English response – together with the spectrum of issues raised by the break-down of the Union – should enforce caution upon the historian who wishes to paint his Civil War scene in bold and simple strokes. During the war itself it was natural that Americans of both sections should make the simple demand of European opinion ‘is it pro-North or pro-South ?’ But the continuation of this tradition by later historians lasted too long, and has ended by befuddling rather than clarifying the situation. The search for partisan alignments too often provides a kind of distorting mirror through which events are viewed, or becomes a Procrustean device by which the data is chopped or stretched into the required form.

In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson, professing himself alarmed by the seemingly “endless growth of relief rolls,” declared “war” on poverty. Walter Heller, his chief economic adviser, had recently remarked that it would be quite possible to eliminate the symptoms of poverty by simply redistributing two percent of the national income. Johnson, however, preferred to attack the sources of deprivation, claiming that the range of rehabilitative services provided by his Economic Opportunity Act would allow the poor to engineer their own paths to affluence.

This article examines the figure of the Returned Yank in Irish popular culture to explain the contradiction between the Irish preoccupation with the figure of the emigrant who returns and the low number of emigrants who actually do return to their native land. The article argues that the Returned Yank is a lieu de mémoire or site of memory – a concept defined by French historian Pierre Nora as “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community” and used by scholars of African American and other cultures with particular concerns about memory and history. As a site of memory, the Irish Returned Yank allows the Irish to explore the meaning of massive population loss, the relationship with a diasporic population of overseas Irish, and tensions between urban and rural life. The article also suggests a relationship between Irish national identity and the Returned Yank.

The Jefferson Davis Highway (JDH) is a controversial Confederate memorial. Since 1913 the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) have placed markers along roadsides across America to commemorate the Confederate President. The women's organization claims that the JDH stretches over four thousand miles from Alexandria, Virginia to the Pacific coast and the Canadian border. In 2002, conflict ensued in the Pacific northwestern state of Washington when a local politician initiated a campaign to remove a granite JDH marker from a state park where it had been erected by the UDC sixty years previously. This led to dispute over whether Jefferson Davis should, or should not, be honoured by a commemorative marker on Washington's border with Canada. Drawing on contemporary secondary sources to interrogate these contests over the meaning of Jefferson Davis and the Confederate legacy, we argue that behind the veneer of heritage and genealogical celebration forwarded by groups such as the UDC there is a neo-Confederate nationalism that works to maintain white supremacy as a dominant interpretation of US history.

“The Americans,” observed a European expatriate in 1837, “do not laugh at honest bluntness, or good-natured simplicity.… If Jonathan is to laugh, he must have a point given him, or, in other words, he must laugh to some purpose.” To Vienna-born Francis Grund, contemporary comic melodrama and its first cousin minstrelsy demonstrated beyond all doubt that his adoptive countrymen were decidedly “fond of laughing at the expense of their neighbors.” “English, French, Dutch, and German,” he noted, “are in turn made to suffer the stings of American wit.… The Irish, of late, has [sic] become very popular.” Grund's commentary reflected both the frequency with which ethnic characters of all sorts were portrayed upon the mid-nineteenth century American stage and, in particular, the emerging public taste for the stage Irishman. A tourists' guidebook to New York City published in 1850 pointed out that six of its seven principal theaters had been turned over to the “burlesque and broad fun” of melodrama and minstrelsy and to Irish character pieces especially. Twice during the 1830s, the British actor Tyrone Power conducted triumphal tours of the United States by relying upon a repertoire of Irish parts.