ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|158 pages
Economic Success and Upward Economic Mobility and the American Dream
chapter 4|10 pages
Earning Rent with Your Talent
chapter 8|12 pages
Achieving the American Dream
part II|38 pages
Contemporary Issues in American Dream Studies
part III|40 pages
Migration and the Immigrant American Dream
chapter 20411|16 pages
Twenty-First-Century African Immigrant View of the American Dream
part IV|66 pages
Marginalized Americans and the American Dream
chapter 24413|10 pages
Incorporation and Disruption
chapter 14|15 pages
The American Dream and Muslim Americans
part V|20 pages
The American Dream Goes Global?
chapter 31017|18 pages
“Good Living” and Immigrants in the Literature of Aleksandar Hemon
part VI|43 pages
Sustainability and the American Dream