American Nightmares: Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction

This volume investigates dystopia in twenty-first-century US fiction. Using a methodological framework based on sociology, it theorizes a correlation between the crisis of the Frontier myth and of American exceptionalism and a renewed interest in dystopian worlds. 　 Part One illustrates the methodological framework, exploring the concept of dystopia, offering an overview of the American myths and of their current status and spotlighting some relevant sociological theories. 　 Part Two applies the proposed methodological framework to four texts, investigating the sub-genres of political, technological and environmental dystopia. The primary works, chosen to show both the relevance of the abovementioned American myths to dystopian narratives and the pervasiveness of the genre across the media, are Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019), Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), David Cage’s video game Detroit: Become Human (2018), and the Hughes Brothers’ 2010 movie The Book of Eli.