Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 by Bentley, Nancy Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture - from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. In Frantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these traditional narratives of the opposition between literary culture and mass culture. For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only now becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley conducts close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists drew upon commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms. Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism, Frantic Panoramas is an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America. Nancy Bentley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World by Paglen, Trevor Blank Spots on the Map is an expose of an empire that continues to grow every year and which, officially, it isn't even there. It is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer's road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and C.I.A. "black ops" sites. This is a shadow nation of state secrets: clandestine military bases, ultra-secret black sites, classified factories, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies making up what defense and intelligence insiders themselves call the "black world." Run by an amorphous group of government agencies and private companies, this empire's ever expanding budget dwarfs that of many good sized countries, yet it denies its own existence. Author Trevor Paglen is a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur. His research into areas that officially don't exist leads him on a globe-trotting investigation into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled black empire - the unmarked blank areas whether you are looking at Google Earth or a U.S. Geological Survey map. Paglen knocks on the doors of CIA prisons, stakes out the Groom Lake covert air base in Nevada from a mountaintop 30 miles away, observes classified spacecraft in the night sky with amateur astronomers, and dissects the Defense Department's multibillion dollar black budget. Traveling to the Middle East, Central America, and even around our nation's capital and its surrounding suburbs, he interviews the people who live on the edges of these blank spots. Whether Paglen reports from a hotel room in Vegas, Washington D. C. suburbs, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Honduras, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, he is impassioned, rigorous, relentless, and eye-opening. This is a human, vivid, and telling portrait of a ballooning national mistake.