Full Description
The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume.
The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America.
Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.
Contents
1. Introduction: Theorizing the American Dream Part I: Economic Success and Upward Economic Mobility and the American Dream 2. In Pursuit of the Elusive American Dream: Black Woman Professionals 3. Markets, Finance, Whiteness, and the American Dream 4. Earning Rent with Your Talent: American Inequality Rests on the Power to Define, Transfer and Institutionalize Talent 5. From American Dream to Nordic Realities? 6. Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream 7. What "American" dream? Contemporary reflections 8. Achieving the American Dream: How Middle Class Blacks Socialize Their Children to Make It to the Top Part II: Contemporary Issues in American Dream Studies 9. What (American) Dreams are made of: Disney's Fairy Tale Narratives 10. How Free-Market Family Policy Crushed the American Dream Part III: Migration and the Immigrant American Dream 11. A Twenty-First Century African Immigrant View of the American Dream's Challenges and Opportunities 12. The Boys from Little Mexico Redux: Dreaming the Immigrant Dream Part IV: Marginalized Americans and the American Dream 13. Incorporation and Disruption: What Fictional Narratives Can Tell Us About the Realities of the American Dream 14. The American Dream and Muslim Americans: (Im)Possibilities and Realities of Pursuing the Dream 15. Gay Neighborhoods: Reimagining the Traditional Conception of the American Dream 16. The American Dream: Rhetoric of Opportunity and Reality of Exclusion Part V: The American Dream Goes Global? 17. "Good Living" and Immigrants in the Literature of Aleksandar Hemon: Towards the Humble Dream Part VI: Sustainability and the American Dream 18. A Dream Deferred: Professional Projects as Racial Projects in US Medicine 19. Status Maintenance, Mobility, and the Persistence of Class Barriers to Achieving the American Dream
