
Author/Contributor(s): | Courtney, Susan |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press, USA |
Date: | 03/01/2017 |
Binding: | Paperback |
Condition: | NEW |
the screen South nonetheless mediated the nation's most paradoxical narratives--namely, land of the free/land of slavery, conquest, and segregation. Whereas confronting such contradictions head-on could capsize cohesive conceptions of the U.S., by now familiar screen forms of the West and the South split them apart to offer convenient, discrete, and consequential imaginary places upon which to collectively project avowed aspirations and dump troubling forms of national waste. Pinpointing some of the most severe yet understudied postwar trends fueling this dynamic--including non-theatrical film road trips, feature films adapted from Tennessee Williams, and atomic test films--and mining their potential for more complex ways of thinking and feeling the nation, Split Screen Nation considers how the vernacular screen forms at issue have helped shape how we imagine not only America's past, but also the limits and possibilities of its present and future.