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ix Contents Acknowledgments xi Preface xv 1 Secret Agents: Visions of Escape, Glimpses of Hope 1 2 Do We Still Want to Believe? The X-Files and the American Struggle with Progressive Action 25 3 Perhaps Today: The Dialectic of Despair and Activism in Popular Evangelical Literature 51 4 God’s Unwanted: Fight Club and the Myth of “Total Revolution” 87 5 Relocating the American Dream: The Challenges and Ambiguities of Contemporary Cultural Pessimism 115 6 The Quest for a Real-World Correlates: Sightings of Cultural Pessimism in the Domains of Scholarship and Journalism 143 7 The Question of Real-World Correlates to Fantasy Processes of Decline: The Deep Structure of Decay, or, Descent into the Engine Room of the Titanic 181 Epilogue: Into the Great Wide Open 215 Bibliographical Essay 219 Notes 245 Index 305 ...

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