Dropouts on the Frontier: T.C. Boyle’s Drop City

Authors

  • Verena Adamik University of Postdam (2013 - present)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.180

Keywords:

T.C. Boyle, counterculture, frontier, popular culture, 1960s

Abstract

This essay will explore the depiction of the hippie movement in the novel Drop City“ by T.C. Boyle. Drawing on the theoretical background of the 1960s counterculture formulated by Stuart Hall, I will trace how the novel depicts the development of the dropout community from their members’ initial desire to move outside of society to a movement back towards the very system that was rejected beforehand by reading the counterculture against the paradigm of the frontier.

Author Biography

Verena Adamik, University of Postdam (2013 - present)

Verena Adamik studied English Literature, American Studies, and Psychology at Julius-Maximilians University of Würzburg, and received her M.A. in 2013 with a thesis on popular Gothic fiction in the late nineteenth century.

She now holds a teaching appointment at the University of Potsdam.

Alongside, she is working on her dissertation on the literary representation of drop-out communities in the USA (Prof. Nicole Waller). Additionally, her research interests include popular culture, depictions of insanity, and horror literature and film.

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Published

2014-05-31

How to Cite

Adamik, Verena. “Dropouts on the Frontier: T.C. Boyle’s Drop City”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, May 2014, doi:10.5283/copas.180.

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2014)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.