The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television

Kirk Boyle is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Literature and Language at the University of North Carolina Asheville. Dan Mrozowski is a visiting assistant professor in the English Department at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he teaches courses in American literature, critical theory, and crime fiction.

Introduction: Creative Documentation of Creative Destruction
Kirk Boyle and Daniel Mrozowski
Section I: Film
Chapter 1: The Imagination of Economic Disaster: Eco-Catastrophe Films of the
Great Recession
Kirk Boyle
Chapter 2: Real-to-Reel Recessionary Horrors in Drag Me to Hell and Contagion
April Miller
Chapter 3: Horror at the Homestead: The (Re)possession of American Property in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity II
James Stone
Section II: Fiction
Chapter 4: “We are the walking dead”: Zombie Literature in Recession-Era America
Lance Rubin
Chapter 5: “Crash Fiction”: American Literary Novels of the Global Financial Crisis
Daniel Mattingly
Chapter 6: Mommy Porn, More or Less: Fifty Shades of Grey and Conservative Feminism in the New Economy
Sarah Domet
Section III: Television
Chapter 7: And They Lived Happily Ever After…Or Not at All: (Un)Imagining African Americans in Recession-Era Popular Culture
Maryann Erigha
Chapter 8: Latino Liminality, Exclusion and Erasure in Great Recession Television: The Case of Treme and Friday Night Lights
Charli Valdez
Chapter 9: Masters, Servants, and the Effaced Middle Classes of Downton Abbey, The Dark Knight Rises, and Falling Skies
Jesseca Cornelson
Chapter 10: From Hoarders to Pickers: Salvage Aesthetics and Reality Television in The Great Recession
Daniel Mrozowski
Section IV: Multimedia
Chapter 11: Congress at the Kitchen Table: Religious Right Applications of Moral Home Economics to Federal Economic Policy
Rebecca Barrett-Fox
Chapter 12: Graphic Radicals: Understanding the Crash and the Art of Resistance
Sarah Hamblin