Both critically and commercially successful filmmakers, the Coen brothers have written, produced, and directed numerous acclaimed films over the past three decades. Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig demonstrate that their comedies, in particular, which are often dismissed as mere entertainments, actually present substantial philosophic and political arguments. They examine five of the Coen brothers’ comedies: Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Hail Caesar!. In those works, they discover insightful engagements with such ideas as questions of human freedom, the relationship of reason to religion, and the nature of liberal democracy in the American regime. They demonstrate how sometimes explicitly, but generally implicitly, the Coens draw on thinkers such as Homer, Plato, Dante, and Hegel, while simultaneously presenting popular entertainment.

The strange and wonderful place of Twin Peaks captivated audiences for more than two decades before its long-awaited return to television in 2017. David Lynch and Mark Frost created a land that embodies the politics of American culture. With its focus on small-town America and life outside urban centers, rural and suburban values play a big part in the overall Twin Peaks narrative. More than just a soapy murder investigation or a mysterious puzzle to be solved, Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return are metaphors for the political years in which they are set. The Politics of Twin Peaks investigates the show’s engagement with American politics and identity. With a close relationship between the two, Twin Peaks is the rare cultural landmark in both film and television whose timelessness is defined by the fact that it can constantly be reinterpreted. Within that sometimes dreamlike Lynchian narrative, Twin Peaks hints at, sometimes explicitly and sometimes subtly, the political fault lines in the United States. In this edited collection, the politics inherent in Twin Peaks is approached from numerous points of view.

The proposed book uses the Star Trek television/movie and Star Wars movie series to explain key international relations (IR) concepts and theories. It begins with an overview of the importance of science fiction in literature and film/television. It then presents the development of the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, and discusses how their progression through time has illustrated key IR theories and concepts. As a bonus, it compares the two franchises to another recent science fiction franchise used to teach IR (Battlestar Galactica).

Flannery O’Connor’s fiction continues to haunt American readers, in part because of its uncanny ability to remind us who we are and what we need. Foss’s book reveals the extent to which O’Connor was a serious reader of the history of political philosophy. She understood the ideas upon which the American regime rests, and she evaluated those ideas from the standpoint of both faith and reason. Foss’s book explains why O’Connor feared that the modern habit to govern by tenderness would lead to terror. After a thorough account of her familiarity with the history of political philosophy, Foss shows how the works of Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, and Nietzsche inform O’Connor’s stories. This does not mean that O’Connor was writing about politics in the narrow sense. Her vision was deeply theological, and she carefully avoided topical stories that promote social agendas. Her concern was with the health of the American regime more broadly, insofar as the manners of a regime affect citizens’ attitudes toward religion. O’Connor does not present a political theory of her own, but as Foss argues, she was a political philosopher in the original sense of the word. Her stories give clear accounts of her political wisdom. Foss further shows the continued relevance of her wisdom in age dominated by abstract modern theories, such as that of John Rawls.

This book corrects an imbalance in Canadian political literature through offering a conservative account of Canadian political thought. Across 15 chronologically organized chapters, and with a mixture of established and rising scholars, the book offers an investigation of the defining features and characteristics of Canadian conservative political thought, asking what have Canadian conservative political thinkers and practitioners learned from other traditions and, in turn, what have they contributed to our understanding of conservative political thought today? Rather than its culmination, Canadian Conservative Political Thought will be the beginning of conservative political thought’s recovery and will spark debates and future research. The book will be a great resource for courses on Canadian politics, history, political philosophy and conservatism, Canadian Studies, and political theory.

AIDS-Trauma and Politics considers American literary representations of the social and political silence surrounding the AIDS crisis in the U.S. in the 1980s. The book offers close readings of such authors as Paul Monette, Mark Doty, Rafael Campo, Sarah Schulman, Tony Kushner, and Larry Kramer in order to argue that the AIDS crisis was born largely without a witness and, as a result, marks a significant trauma in U.S. history. Grounded by trauma studies, AIDS-Trauma and Politics argues that the arts, exemplified here by literature and film, uniquely underscore social problems otherwise overlooked by such discourses as politics, the law, and journalism. Defining the 1980s AIDS crisis as a perfect case, this book proposes to redefine trauma not simply as an event that happened too soon, but rather as an ongoing series of oversights resulting in a failure to acknowledge or witness the humanity of those who suffer.

Presenting the first interdisciplinary consideration of his political thought, Updike and Politics: New Considerations establishes a new scholarly foundation for assessing one of the most recognized and significant American writers of the post-1945 period. This book brings together a diverse group of American and international scholars, including contributors from Japan, India, Israel, and Europe. Like Updike himself, the collection canvases a wide range of topics, including Updike’s too often overlooked poetry and his single play. Its essays deal with not only political themes such as the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice, or violence but also the more divisive elements in Updike’s work like race, gender, imperialism, hegemony, and technology. Ultimately, the book reveals how Updike’s immense body of work illuminates the central political questions and problems that troubled American culture during the second half of the twentieth century as well as the opening decade of the new millennium.