Screening American Nostalgia: Essays on Pop Culture Constructions of Past Times - Paperback

by Susan Flynn (Editor), Antonia MacKay (Editor)

This book examines American screen culture and its power to create and sustain values. Looking specifically at the ways in which nostalgia colors the visions of American life, essays explore contemporary American ideology as it is created and sustained by the screen. Nostalgia is omnipresent, selling a version of America that arguably never existed. Current socio-cultural challenges are played out onscreen and placed within the historical milieu through a nostalgic lens which is tempered by contemporary conservatism. Essays reveal not only the visual catalog of recognizable motifs but also how these are used to temper the uncertainty of contemporary crises. Media covered spans from 1939's Gone with the Wind, to Stranger Things, The Americans, Twin Peaks, the Fallout franchise and more.

Author Biography

Susan Flynn is the director of Educore, the education research center of the Institute of Technology, Carlow, Ireland, an associate researcher at University College Dublin and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the United Kingdom. She specializes in digital screen culture, equality and pedagogy. Antonia Mackay is a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom. She specializes in American literature and culture, twentieth and twenty-first century literature and cultural and media studies.