Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond by Carl Abbott PDF

we are living close to the edge—whether in a cost on the middle of the Rockies, a gated neighborhood tucked into the wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains, a silicon tradition rising within the suburbs, or, sooner or later, homesteading on a terraformed Mars. In Imagined Frontiers, city historian and pop culture student Carl Abbott appears to be like on the paintings of yank artists who've used novels, movie, tv, maps, and sometimes even functionality artwork to discover those frontiers—the metropolitan frontier of suburban improvement, the vintage continental frontier of yankee cost, and the but unrealized frontiers past Earth.

concentrating on writers and artists operating in the past half-century, an period of world financial and social succeed in, Abbott describes the discussion among historians and social scientists trying to comprehend those frontier areas and the artists reimagining them in written and visible fictions. This e-book bargains views on such famous authors as T. C. Boyle and John Updike and on such time-honored video clips and tv exhibits as Falling Down and The Sopranos. by means of placing The Rockford records and the cult favourite Firefly in dialog with well known fiction writers Robert Heinlein and Stephen King and literary novelists Peter Matthiessen and Leslie Marmon Silko, Abbott interweaves the disparate matters of western historical past, city making plans, and technology fiction in one volume.

Abbott combines all-new essays with others formerly released yet considerably revised to combine western and concrete background, literary research, and American reports scholarship in a uniquely compelling research of the frontier in well known culture.