Date of Award
2013
Document Type
Thesis
Publication Status
Version of Record
Submission Date
October 2026
Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]
Ulin, Julieann V.
Abstract
This thesis takes a cultural studies approach to representations of post-war U.S. suburbia in Richard Yates’ 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, as well as in the contemporary AMC television series Mad Men. These texts explore the postwar time period, which holds a persistently prominent and idealized space in the collective cultural imagination of America, despite the fact that it was a period troubled by isolationism, containment culture, rampant consumerism, and extreme pressure to conform to social roles. This project disrupts the romantic narrative of postwar America by focusing on the latent anxiety within the suburban landscape—by interrogating the performative nature of the planned communities of the 1950s and 1960s and exposing the tensions that were borne out of the rise of domesticity and consumerism. This project explores the descent into a society obsessed with consumerism and conformity, and seeks to interrogate the culture’s false nostalgia for the time period.
Extent
92 p.
Recommended Citation
Kiley, Erin M., "A troubled past: reconfiguring postwar suburban American identity in revolutionary road, 1961 and mad men, 2007-2012" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019. 680.
https://digitalcommons.fau.edu/etd_general_6/680
Identifier
FA0004031
Comments
Includes bibliography.|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.|Includes bibliography.