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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History Of The World’S Greatest Hero By Roy Schwartz, Gabriel C. Salter Oct 2022

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History Of The World’S Greatest Hero By Roy Schwartz, Gabriel C. Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In Is Superman Circumcised?, Russell Schwartz provides a historical overview of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's creation of the comic book character Superman, arguing that Siegel and Shuster's backgrounds in Jewish immigrants gives a particularly Jewish subtext to their character. Schwartz builds on this argument with a larger historical overview of American comic book publishing, showing how Judaism and Jewish-American immigrant experiences have informed that industry from its earliest days.


Catastrophic Christianity: An Iconological Study Of The Messianic Idea In American Protestant Christianity Circa 1900-1940, Adam D. J. Brett Jul 2022

Catastrophic Christianity: An Iconological Study Of The Messianic Idea In American Protestant Christianity Circa 1900-1940, Adam D. J. Brett

Dissertations - ALL

A historically variegated emblem of trust and faith, the messianic idea is the offer of religion to the people for salvation from the coming catastrophe. This dissertation analyzes the messianic idea in "America." The foci of the study are popular messianic figurations that serve as heuristic devices to explicate early 20th century U.S. culture, revealing two ideological impulses that encapsulate collective responses to the anxieties of the age: authoritarian-populism and catastrophic-utopianism. Four case studies, encompassing four different genres of media, define and illustrate these ideological impulses: The Fundamentals, Superman comic books, Bruce Barton's capitalist Christianity, and The Wizard of Oz …