Vote With a Bullet

Given that assassination is such a widespread trope in American culture, it is surprising that there is no scholarly monograph on assassination in American fiction providing either an overview or a critical assessment of the field. Vote with a Bullet achieves both, offering not only the first systematic study of American assassination fiction but also a coherent argument about its larger cultural, aesthetic, and political significance in the present moment as well as in the respective historical contexts of the works themselves. This study argues that American assassination fiction offers a symbolic condensation of the larger conflict between individual and society that is at the heart of modern democracy, and that has been especially contested in the democratic culture of the US. Starting with Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) and ending with Noah Hawley's The Good Father (2012), the study analyzes thirteen works that range from canonical classics (Penn Warren's All the King's Men) to science fiction (Philip K. Dick's Solar Lottery)to popular genre fiction (Stephen King's The Dead Zone and 11/22/63) to historiographic metafiction (Don Delillo's Libra). It finds a loose yet identifiable continuum of assassination fiction, an imaginary laboratory in which fantasies of individual empowerment and/or social unity play out in very different ways. The texts combine aesthetics and politics to negotiate the tension between individualism and mass society in a democracy that is based on the former, which it must nevertheless restrict if it is to constitute the latter. Furthermore, the study connects the imaginary of assassination with a variety of related themes such as hegemonic masculinity and whiteness, electoral and non-electoral political choice,agency panic, subjectivity, conspiracies and conspiracy theory, and the respective sociohistorical context of each publication, with a particular view to how different generic frameworks have shaped varieties of assassination fiction at certain points inAmerican history--