The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume.
The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America.
Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.
Robert C. Hauhart is a Professor in the Department of Society and Social Justice at Saint Martin's University, USA, where he teaches courses in sociology, criminology, social justice, law, and literature. His research focuses on the concept of the American Dream in twentieth and twenty-first century sociology, as well as research and writiing on multiple themes, including the American Dream, in American literature. In 2019 he was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award to teach and research the American Dream at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) in Ljubljana, where he maintains an association as a visiting research fellow. He is the author of several books, including The Lonely Quest: Constructing the Self in the Twenty-First Century United States (Routledge, 2018) and Seeking the American Dream: A Sociological Inquiry (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), which was nominated for the Pacific Sociological Association's Distinguished Scholarship Award in 2017. He is also co-editor of American Writers in Exile (Salem Press 2015); Social Justice in American Literature (Salem Press 2017); European Writers in Exile (Lexington Books 2018); Connections and Influences Between the Russian and American Short Story (Lexington Books 2021); The Routledge Handbook of the American Dream: Volume 1 (Routledge, 2021), and Significant Food in American Literature (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming). He is the co-author (with Jon Grahe, Pacific Lutheran University, of Designing and Teachiing Undergraduate Capstone Courses (Jossey-Bass/Wiley 2015)
Mitja Sardoč is Senior Research Associate at the Educational Research Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he is a member of the Educational Research program. His research interests include citizenship education, patriotism, multiculturalism, toleration, radicalization and violent extremism, talents and distributive justice, and equality of opportunity. He is editor of numerous books including, most recently, Handbook of Patriotism (Springer 2020), The Impacts of Neoliberal Discourse and Language in Education: Critical Perspectives on a Rhetoric of Equality, Well-Being, and Justice (Routledge, 2021), The Palgrave Handbook of Toleration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Making Sense of Radicalization and Violent Extremism: Interviews and Conversations (Routledge, 2022), and Talents and Distributive Justice (Routledge, 2022). He is also co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the American Dream: Volume 1 (2021) and Managing Editor of the Theory and Research in Education journal.
