Gore Vidal's America

by Altman, Dennis

• ISBN13: 9780745633633
• ISBN10: 0745633633
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-10-28
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

Gore Vidal is one of the most significant American writers of the second half of the twentieth century, having produced a large number of best selling novels, essays, plays and pamphlets which have impacted on major political and social debates for fifty years. He is both a serious writer and a television and movie celebrity, whose increasingly acerbic picture of the United States guarantees he is both revered and reviled.Gore Vidal's America examines the ways in which Vidal's writings on history, politics, sex and religion throw into focus our understandings of the United States, but also recognizes his versatility and inventiveness as a creative writer, some of whose novels - Julian; Myra Breckinridge; Lincoln; Duluth - are among the important literary works of their time.Ranging from Vidal's early defence of homosexuality in The City and the Pillar (1948) to his most recent writings on the war in Iraq, this book provides a unique perspective on the evolution of post-World War II American society, politics and literature. As Altman writes: "Difficult not to see in the results of the 2004 elections, where the Republican right gained in both the White House and the Senate, proof of Vidal's worse fears, namely that the impact of imperial adventure, big money and religious moralism would increasingly imperil the American Republic."

Author Biography

Dennis Altman is Professor of Politics at LaTrobe University

Table of Contents

Preface

The Writer as Social Critic

Acknowledgements

Introduction

One Vidal's Life

Two Celebrity

Three America and its History

Gore Vidal's American Chronicles

The Growth of American Empire

Masculinity and Empire

Four Politics

Vidal and America in the Twenty First Century

Gore Vidal and `Political Correctness'

Five Vidal as Writer

Six Sex

Gore Vidal and Queer Theory

Seven Hollywood

Eight Religion

Nine Gore Vidal's America

Personal Note

Notes

References

Chronology

General index

Index of Fictional Characters

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