The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume.
The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America.
Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.
Author(s): Robert C. Hauhart, Mitja Sardoč
Series: Routledge International Handbooks
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 404
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Endorsements
Title Page
Copyright Page
CONTENTS
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Preface
Contributors
1. Introduction: Theorizing The American Dream
PART I: Economic Success and Upward Economic Mobility and the American Dream
2. In Pursuit of the Elusive American Dream: Black Woman Professionals
3. Markets, Finance, Whiteness, and The American Dream
4. Earning Rent with Your Talent: American Inequality Rests on The Power to Define, Transfer, and Institutionalize Talent
5. From American Dream to Nordic Realities?
6. Equality, Opportunity, and The American Dream
7. What “American” Dream?: Contemporary Reflections
8. Achieving The American Dream: How Middle Class Blacks Socialize Their Children to Make it to the Top
PART II: Contemporary Issues in American Dream Studies
9. What (American) Dreams are Made of: Disney’s Fairy Tale Narratives
10. How Free-Market Family Policy Crushed The American Dream
PART III: Migration and the Immigrant American Dream
11. Twenty-First-Century African Immigrant View of The American Dream: Challenges and Opportunities
12. The Boys From Little Mexico Redux: Dreaming the Immigrant Dream
PART IV: Marginalized Americans and the American Dream
13. Incorporation and Disruption: What Fictional Narratives Reveal about the Realities of The American Dream
14. The American Dream and Muslim Americans: (Im)possibilities and Realities of Pursuing the Dream
15. Gay Neighborhoods: Reimagining the Traditional Conception of The American Dream
16. The American Dream: Rhetoric of Opportunity and Reality of Exclusion
PART V: The American Dream Goes Global?
17. “Good Living” and Immigrants in The Literature of Aleksandar Hemon: Toward the Humble Dream
PART VI: Sustainability and the American Dream
18. A Dream Deferred: Professional Projects as Racial Projects in US Medicine
19. Status Maintenance, Mobility, and The Persistence of Class Barriers to Achieving The American Dream
Index
