In this innovative and exciting synthesis of historical analysis, literary criticism, and personal essay, Dorothee E. Kocks explores the links between place and political ideals in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the iconography of the American West. Dream a Little explores the American tradition of using the land to reveal and elaborate our dreams for social justice.
Writing with a novelist's sensitivity toward language, Kocks explores the idea that Americans have historically looked to the land for answers to society's problems. To illustrate this point, she...

Dorothee Kocks steals intimate details from American history to craft a novel of sensuality, ecstasy and music that reads at the pace of a thriller.Young Chjara Vall is exiled from Corsica sold as a servant to an opium addict in Paris. Music paves the way for her to flee with Henry, her love, to post-revolutionary America. There the new freedoms and Puritan vigor compete for ascendancy. Chjara woos and scandalizes in equal measure with her playing of Benjamin Franklin 's glass harmonica, while Henry hides his trade in erotica and forbidden books. Secrets gather and the charge between the...