REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 34

Can the concept of American democratic culture provide a framework for the interpretation and critique of contemporary American populisms? Have contemporary United States writers, artists and activists imagined modes of democratic sociality that constitute the precondition for yet are irreducible to extant populist imaginaries? How has the fracturing of the media infrastructure contributed to Donald Trump's strain of populism? Do the modes of analysis devised to diagnose twentieth century populisms provide adequate frameworks to understand Trump's movement? The disparate yet complementary perspectives from which its contributors engage these and related questions promise to enhance the explanatory potential of this volume of REAL.

Until recently populism was linked to the radical right. But the left-wing populists in Spain's Podemos and the U.S. democratic party have discredited the belief that populist sentiments can be restricted to reactionary right-wing partisans. In the 1960s, the American historian Richard Hofstadter characterized right-wing populism as expressive of a "paranoid style" of politics. Whereas Hofstadter denounced populism as a threat to democracy, apologists for contemporary populist movements have defended them as a corrective to political contradictions internal to liberal democracy. These remarks suggest that U.S. populist movements cannot be understood apart from their relationships to American democratic. If that is the case, can the concept of American democratic culture provide a framework for the interpretation and critique of contemporary American populisms? Have contemporary United States writers, artists and activists imagined modes of democratic sociality that constitute the precondition for yet are irreducible to extant populist imaginaries? How has the fracturing of the media infrastructure contributed to Donald Trump's strain of populism? Do the modes of analysis devised to diagnose twentieth century populisms provide adequate frameworks to understand Trump's movement? The disparate yet complementary perspectives from which its contributors engage these and related questions promise to enhance the explanatory potential of this volume of REAL.