Stephen King and American Politics

Stephen King and American Politics examines the complicated political character of King's fiction. From the 1960s to Donald Trump, these works force us question how America got into its current political crisis - and where it might go from here.

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From The Long Walk to The Outsider, Stephen King's output reflects the major political concerns of the previous fifty years. This book, Stephen King and American Politics, is the first sustained study of the complex ways in which King's texts speak to their unique political moments. By exploring this aspect of the author's popular works, readers might better understand the numerous crises that Americans currently face in a book that surveys King's corpus to address a wide range of issues - including the spread of neoliberalism, the Bush-Cheney doctrine, and the chaos of the populist present. Although his fiction outwardly declares itself to be anti-political - thus reflecting a widespread shift away from democracy in the aftermath of the 1960s - political energies persist just beneath the surface. Given the possibility of a political resurgence that haunts so many of his page-turners, Stephen King produces horror and hope in equal measure.