European Journal of American Culture - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2007

This article concerns the US 2008 presidential election. It examines the likely nominees for the Republicans and Democrats, and the respective strengths and weaknesses of the frontrunners, Senator John McCain and Senator Hillary Clinton. Who (if any) are their most formidable challengers among the other candidates for the Republican and Democrat nominations? It offers an analysis of how, if nominated, these strengths and weaknesses may play at the general election. And it offers a guide to likely vice-presidential candidates (especially for, if nominated, the current frontrunners).

The news that the USA was only prepared to fund British post-war social re-construction with an enormous loan instead of a grant came as a tremendous shock to most Britons in 1945/46. Why did the British think their contribution to the outcome of World War II, and in particular their Battle of Britain victory, give them a moral claim on the American purse? RAF pilots as objects of American hero-worship.

Rather than revelling in postmodern depthlessness DeLillo's fiction pursues a Modernist fascination with aesthetic transcendence, which is usually invested in invocations of the visual arts. The novel is then proposed as a form of resistance to media saturation and death as spectacle.

Just as man is explicable by nothing less than his entire history, so Emerson's ideas on history need the context of their own history the influence of European Romantic developments and interest in history and New England Puritanism. Emerson has been dismissed by many as ahistorical; yet, History is one of the cornerstones of the Emersonian world view an abstract, dry shell of a concept he seeks to redefine as something vital. His attitudes towards history are indicative of his broader push to break with tradition and to approach human and cultural needs afresh and empower the American Individual.

Material proofs or Imaginary Property? Complex intellectual, historical and cultural relationships have always existed between the experimentation with rhetoric and the spectacle of the slave body in abolitionist literature. This article debates the challenges the eighteenth and nineteenth century writers offered to the widespread representation of the slave body within mainstream North American, British and Caribbean abolitionist discourse. The commitment of writers such as Robert Wedderburn, Phillis Wheatley, David Walker and Jupiter Hammon to experimental language and subject-matter testifies to the existence of a radical literary tradition much earlier than the popularly examined mid-nineteenth century authors, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. These earlier figures were intent, not only upon extending the permissible boundaries of abolitionist representation, but also in staking a claim for the politically liberating potential of the literary imagination in a fight for the right to aesthetic experimentation.