Contents Preface vii 1. Introduction: Constraints of the Imagination 1 1.1 The American Fifties 9 1.2 Symbolic Convergence Theory 13 1.3 The Containment-Subversion-Theory of American Dissent 16 1.4 The American Jeremiad and Fifties Nostalgia 25 2. Indignation: The Unpronounceable Sentence Pronounced 31 2.1 American Individualism in a Changing World 34 2.2 Metatextual Dimensions: A Voice from Beyond the Grave 60 2.3 Slaughterhouse America 78 2.4 The Ideological Framework of Indignation 88 3. I Married a Communist: In Gossip We Trust 92 3.1 Dissenters in an Age of Conformity 110 3.2 I Married a Communist and the Culture Wars 125 3.3 Novelistic Experiments with Autobiography 139 3.4 The Ideological Framework of I Married a Communist 150 4. Sabbath's Theater: You are America 153 4.1 The American Malaise 156 4.2 Theatrum Mundi 174 4.3 The Ideological Framework of Sabbath's Theater 186 5. The Past Undetonated 189 6. Works Cited 194 Abbreviations 209 ukryj opis