Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Small Town as Modern Nation Form

1. Sacred Islands in Modernity: The Prehistory of the Dominant Small Town
2. An Unfinished Revolution: "The Revolt from the Village" Reconsidered
3. Mapping the Modern Small Town: A Circular Imaginary
4. A New Machine in the Small-Town Garden: Periodizing an Automodernity
5. The Formation of a U.S. Fascist Aesthetics; or, Welcome to Main Street
6. Staging and Archiving the Nation: Pedagogical Theater, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and U.S. Imperialism
7. "One Happy World": The Postmodern Small Town and the Small-Town Postmodern
8. Global Belonging: The Small Town as the World's Home

Afterword: The Global Village

Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

RYAN POLL teaches in the English department at Northeastern Illinois University.

Reviews

“Elegantly written, Main Street and Empire is of the utmost importance to the reconceptualization of American exceptionalism within a transnational geography. This book is certain to exert a major influence on accounts of global American modernity for many years to come.”
*founding director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth*

"The most incisive analysis available about representational discourses of small towns U.S.A. From classic texts to corporate advertising, Poll reveals a small town imaginary shaping an age of globalization."
*author of Class Degrees*

"Using broad cultural analysis, Poll investigates the centrality of the small town, as represented in literature, to the cultural imagination of the US. An impressive, multifaceted exploration of the small town as a symbol. Readers with some background in literary theory will find this book most compelling. Recommended."
*Choice*