The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture sheds light on how imaginary works of fiction, film, and television reflect, refract, and respond to the recessionary times specific to the twenty-first century, a sustained period of economic crisis that has earned the title the "Great Recession." This collection takes as its focus "Bust Culture," a concept that refers to post-crash popular culture, specifically the kind mass produced by multinational corporations in the age of media conglomeration, which is inflected by diminishment, influenced by scarcity, and infused with anxiety. The multidisciplinary contributors collected here examine mass culture not typically included in discussions of the financial meltdown, from disaster films to reality TV hoarders, the horror genre to reactionary representations of women, Christian right radio to Batman, television characters of color to graphic novels and literary fiction. The collected essays treat our busted culture as a seismograph that registers the traumas of collapse, and locate their pop artifacts along a spectrum of ideological fantasies, social erasures, and profound fears inspired by the Great Recession. What they discover from these unlikely indicators of the recession is a mix of regressive, progressive, and bemused texts in need of critical translation.
Introduction: Creative Documentation of Creative Destruction Kirk Boyle and Daniel Mrozowski Section I: Film Chapter 1: The Imagination of Economic Disaster: Eco-Catastrophe Films of the Great Recession Kirk Boyle Chapter 2: Real-to-Reel Recessionary Horrors in Drag Me to Hell and Contagion April Miller Chapter 3: Horror at the Homestead: The (Re)possession of American Property in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity II James Stone Section II: Fiction Chapter 4: "We are the walking dead": Zombie Literature in Recession-Era America Lance Rubin Chapter 5: "Crash Fiction": American Literary Novels of the Global Financial Crisis Daniel Mattingly Chapter 6: Mommy Porn, More or Less: Fifty Shades of Grey and Conservative Feminism in the New Economy Sarah Domet Section III: Television Chapter 7: And They Lived Happily Ever After...Or Not at All: (Un)Imagining African Americans in Recession-Era Popular Culture Maryann Erigha Chapter 8: Latino Liminality, Exclusion and Erasure in Great Recession Television: The Case of Treme and Friday Night Lights Charli Valdez Chapter 9: Masters, Servants, and the Effaced Middle Classes of Downton Abbey, The Dark Knight Rises, and Falling Skies Jesseca Cornelson Chapter 10: From Hoarders to Pickers: Salvage Aesthetics and Reality Television in The Great Recession Daniel Mrozowski Section IV: Multimedia Chapter 11: Congress at the Kitchen Table: Religious Right Applications of Moral Home Economics to Federal Economic Policy Rebecca Barrett-Fox Chapter 12: Graphic Radicals: Understanding the Crash and the Art of Resistance Sarah Hamblin
