Cowboy Politics uses key works of literature, film, and television to explore how westerns address political challenges of Western civilization. This book tracks how westerns supplement liberal politics with republican, populist, perfectionist, and environmentalist politics.

This book offers a combined historical and aesthetic analysis of five novels from Philip Roth's later career. It reads these works in the context of political, cultural, and literary developments in America from the New Deal to the present.

This book analyzes major films about the American political process since the 1930s. It considers the films' major themes about politics, ideology, and representation of race and gender over the past several decades.

This history of the early American film industry identifies key political aspects in the rise of the classical Hollywood system. It uniquely identifies and explores the political development of American film that shows how movies shaped political culture and consumer capitalism in the twentieth century.

This book demonstrates how government bureaucracy is portrayed in the top ten box office grossing films from 2000-2015. Perhaps unsurprisingly, government is generally portrayed poorly, but individual government bureaucrats are typically depicted positively.

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare's political outlook by comparing some of the playwright's best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. This ultimately reveals the materialist principles that underpin Shakespeare's imaginary states.

This book explores happiness research and liberal theory. It treats four American novelists as political thinkers through close textual analysis of their novels. This book concludes that friendship is the real basis of happiness and that it is an alternative to the individualistic pursuit of happiness.

This book explores and evaluates Henry David Thoreau's political thought through the lens of a theory of imagination and considers his legacy for later environmental thought. This book will interest anyone curious about Thoreau's relationship to environmentalism and the intersection of environmental humanities and politics.

It's hard to imagine the American dream without American road trips. This book takes readers on a journey through American road trip stories, revealing that they involve more than mere escapism--that they are an important and long-neglected source of American political thought.

This book examines each of Lewis's novels on key themes in the history of political thought and democracy, including freedom and purpose, success and materialism, and nationalism and race. Lewis is revealed to be an unapologetic individualist and a fierce humanitarian.