Revisiting and Revising the Fifties in Contemporary US Popular Culture

In this book, Eleonora Ravizza analyzes how contemporary American popular culture has represented and reproduced the fifties. By investigating the cultural work of films and TV series from the last two decades, the book uncovers the inherent limitations of a 'revisionist' take on the fifties. Ravizza argues that, due to the visual nature of the fiftiescrystallized in American consciousness through the widespread influence of televisionmost contemporary attempts to rework and rewrite the regressive gender, queer, and racial politics fall short of such a revisionist reevaluation.

a cultural- and literary-studies investigation

Autorentext

Eleonora Ravizza works at the Institute for American Studies at Leipzig University as a lecturer. Her primary research interests include popular culture and literature, gender, queerness, genre, and psychoanalysis.

Inhalt

The Fifties: Constructing American Identity.- The Melodramatic Mode: Suffering Bodies and Troubled Minds.- Fifties Self-Reflexivity: Pleasure, Media, and Cultural Politics.-
The Politics of Queer Nostalgia.