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The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online
By: Jeff SmithImprint: University of Wisconsin Press
Format: Adobe Encrypted (DRM)
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In such popular television series as The West Wing and 24, in thrillers like Tom Clancy¿s novels, and in recent films, plays, graphic novels, and internet cartoons, America has been led by an amazing variety of chief executives. Some of these are real presidents who have been fictionally reimagined. Others are ¿might-have-beens¿ like Philip Roth¿s President Charles Lindbergh. Many more have never existed except in some storyteller¿s mind. In The Presidents We Imagine, Jeff Smith examines the presidency¿s ever-changing place in the American imagination. Ranging across different media and analyzing works of many kinds, some familiar and some never before studied, he explores the evolution of presidential fictions, their central themes, the impact on them of new and emerging media, and their largely unexamined role in the nation¿s real politics. Smith traces fictions of the presidency from the plays and polemics of the eighteenth century—when the new office was born in what Alexander Hamilton called ¿the regions of fiction¿; to the digital products of the twenty-first century, with their seemingly limitless user-defined ways of imagining the world¿s most important political figure. Students of American culture and politics, as well as readers interested in political fiction and film, will find here a colorful, indispensable guide to the many surprising ways Americans have been ¿representing¿ presidents even as those presidents have represented them.
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| Title of eBook: The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online | |
| Release Date: 03-19-2009 | |
| Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press |
This eBook download is available in the following formats:
| Parent title | The Presidents We Imagine: Two... |
|---|---|
| Encrypted (DRM) | Yes |
| SKU | 9780299231835 |
| File size | 5885 |
| Security | n/a |
| Printing | Not allowed |
| Copying | Not allowed |
| Read aloud | No Sys requirements Download reader |
| Devices | Samsung Tablet, Apple Ipad & Iphone, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo eReader, Aluratek Libre, Iliad, Nokia, Blackberry, Hanlin |
| Note | Excellent navigation features are available via Adobe such as bookmarks and a quick access table of contents. Text search is easily accessible. An Adobe DRM-protected file is different than a pdf file in that it uses Adobe DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology, which authors and publishers use to protect their content from illegal online distribution and to set certain privileges such as restrictions on copying and printing. |
The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online
Chapter One
Imagining a President
George Washington and His Fictional Predecessors
* * *
Here the writers against the Constitution seem to have taken pains to signalize their talent of misrepresentation. Calculating upon the aversion of the people to monarchy, they have endeavored to enlist all their jealousies and apprehensions in opposition to the intended President of the United States; not merely as the embryo, but as the full-grown progeny, of that detested parent. To establish the pretended affinity, they have not scrupled to draw resources even from the regions of fiction. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 67
* * *
America began appearing in European literature before more than a handful of Europeans had ever been there. By one account, Shakespeare's The Tempest is a vision of America circa 1611. One might call it a literary "reworking" of early travelers' reports, except that those reports were already products of a literary imagination. Fictions-well-established, even ancient, stories and storytelling styles-were involved in imagining, indeed perceiving, even something as big, visible, and solid as a continent.
The presidency, at first, was not big, visible, or solid; it was a new, in some ways unprecedented, creation, designed for a government that no one had yet seen operate. It therefore should not surprise us-even if it did surprise and disgust Alexander Hamilton, one of the presidency's chief proponents-that attempts to imagine it led into "th
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