Stephen Fender taught American Studies at Sussex for many years and is an honorary professor of English at UCL. His books include The Great American Speech: Words and Monuments and Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature.
In the middle of the Depression, Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) set out to increase American purchasing power by getting the unemployed back to work. For the most part they planted forests, graded roads and developed outdoorsy holiday resorts, but the WPA also recruited 40,000 writers, theatrical workers, musicians and artists, most of them on relief, to work on four...
The topic of national self-regard falls under the general historical heading of ‘exceptionalism’ – where claims are made as to the unique quality of national experience, or...
Of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul? Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow Near the end of The Great Gatsby Nick...
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