Lexington Books
Pages: 230
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-0-7391-7378-7 • Hardback • August 2012 • $128.00 • (£98.00)
978-0-7391-9758-5 • Paperback • July 2014 • $59.99 • (£46.00)
978-0-7391-7379-4 • eBook • July 2012 • $57.00 • (£44.00)
Heather Marcovitch is professor of English at Red Deer College, where she teaches courses in Victorian literature and critical theory.
Nancy E. Batty is professor of English at Red Deer College, where she has taught American and international literature and science fiction for almost twenty years.
Introduction, Nancy Batty and Heather Marcovitch
Part 1. Working Girls
Chapter 1. Sex, Novels, and the Working Girl: Mad Men and Women’s Bestsellers of the 1960s, Heather Marcovitch
Part 2. What Do a Meaningless Secretary and a Humorless Bitch Have in Common?
Everything. Or: Joan, Peggy, and the Convergence of Mad Men’s Career Girls, Ann Ciasullo
Chapter 3. Not a “Jackie,” Not a “Marilyn”: Mad Men and the Threat of Peggy Olson, Mary Ruth Marotte
Chapter 4. Joey, Joan, and the Gold-Plated Necklace, Hannah Farrell
Chapter 5. Mad Men? The Portrayal of Mad Women in the Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Of Mad Men’s First Season, Joan Crate
Part 3. Utopian Visions and Social Realities
Chapter 6. Is This the Traditional American Family We’ve Been Hearing So Much About?:
Marriage, Children, and Family Values in Mad Men, Julia C. Wilson and Joseph H. Lane, Jr.
Chapter 7. The Good Place That Cannot Be: Visual Representations of Utopia on Mad Men, Jessica Campbell
Chapter 8. Carla: A Woman of Quiet Strength and Dignity, Elwood Watson
Chapter 9. Beautiful Girls, Feminist Consciousness, and Civil Rights, Beth Mauldin and Patricia Ventura
Part 4. Mad Men’s Generations: Domesticity and the Family
Chapter 10. “It Was All a Fog”: Motherhood and the Birth Experience in Mad Men, Katie Arosteguy
Chapter 11. Tearing Out the Kitchen, Angela Rasmussen and Andrea Reid
Chapter 12. Bishops, Knights, and Pawns: Mad Men and Narrative Strategy, Carol M. Dole
Chapter 13. Mad Men’s Epoch-Eclipse: Marking Time with Sally Draper, Nancy Batty
This collection of thirteen essays matches its subject’s invention, wit, and historical earnestness. The scholarship is creative, carrying theoretical sophistication with a lightness of touch. This study of the contemporary cultural phenomenon that is Mad Men is important for anyone interested in understanding how a television show can dramatize the political implications of gender, race, family, and the intersection between the workplace and the home. Readers will have fun while they tussle with important ideas and recognize shrewd connections between past and present.
— Roderick McGillis, The University of Calgary
At last, the most provocative series on TV gets its due academic analysis. Each essay here provides trenchant insights into the show and how it reflects our culture and its influences.
— Maurice Yacowar, University of Calgary
A roundup of bestsellers from the decade introduces readers to how what happens to Mad Men’s characters mirrors the common story lines of novels centering on the bored housewife, the swinging single, the business man, and the working girl.
— Communication Booknotes Quarterly