Asked by an interviewer about the starting-point for his stories, Raymond Carver once commented:

I never start with an idea. I always see something. I start with an image, a cigarette being put out in a jar of mustard, for instance, or the remains, the wreckage of a dinner left on the table. Pop cans in the fireplace, that sort of thing. And a feeling goes with that. And that feeling seems to transport me back to that particular time and place, and the ambiance of the time. But it is the image, and the emotion that goes with that image – that's what's important.

If Carver was interested in moving from the image into narrative, his stories have had a tendency to inspire their readers to translate them back into images. This was initially a critical tendency, as parallels were frequently drawn between Carver's stories and the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the paintings and sculptures of Photo Realists such as Duane Hanson, Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. But it was not only critics who looked to draw connections. In 1989, for example, Jo Ann Callis used a selection of Carver's poems to accompany her photographs in an exhibition catalogue, Objects of Reverie, while Bob Adelman has produced a book of photographs purporting to represent Carver Country.

A unified Europe – the economic and political powerhouse of the world – looms just over the horizon. All that is lacking is a strong personality to galvanise and unify the various factions on the continent. And that person is coming!

Charles Dyer, World News and Bible Prophecy (1993, 206)

The subject of Europe, its history, politics, and integration, is an important area of study across a range of academic disciplines and professional spheres. Theorists and policy-makers alike have made European developments, particularly the elements of union, a key area of inquiry. This article seeks to explore a somewhat neglected field of analysis – the influence of religion in shaping understandings of Europe. In contrast to much work on Europe, my focus here is on the European perspective of a particular group of outsiders: conservative, premillennial Protestants in the United States.

Native of St. Petersburg, author of works in Russian and French as well as English, and sometime goalkeeper for Trinity College, Cambridge, soccer team, Vladimir Nabokov would not appear to be the most obvious avatar of American Studies in the subject's nationalist phase of the 1950s. My argument, however, is that Lolita, which first appeared in 1955, can be seen as symbiotically intertwined with various classic texts of American Studies that helped to invent and define the field during the Truman and Eisenhower years. At times, the dream of Eden that permeates Nabokov's narrative impels it towards becoming a parody of the early American Studies movement, which harboured within its collective consciousness similar vestiges of an imaginary paradise. More dexterously, though, Lolita makes the theoretical parameters of this movement visible, so that Nabokov's novel might more accurately be described as a metafiction of area studies: a text which holds up a mirror to the implicit assumptions of American Studies and renders them translucent. Just as the process of metafiction can reilluminate ways in which more traditional artefacts have been constructed, so Nabokov's virtualization of American Studies also reflects back upon the established boundaries of other national formations and nation-states, foregrounding the contingent status of their supposedly naturalized values and social markers. In particular, by focusing upon the cultural reception of Lolita in Britain, we will see how the book brings into play troublesome questions about the relationship between formal aesthetics, public morality, and social power. In this sense, Nabokov's perverse reinscription of American Studies might be seen ironically to highlight the multiple dilemmas involved in circumscribing specific national territories for academic study or political jurisdiction.

In the spring of 1942, the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company was gearing up for the most productive three years in its history. With the United States at war, the demand for transport ships would soon propel the Chester-based shipyard to a position of unmatched prominence in the industry – a remarkable development for a concern that was originally conceived as a support subsidiary for its parent, the Sun Oil Company. Twenty-six years earlier, Joseph N. Pew, the younger of two brothers who oversaw the fortunes of Sun Oil, had suggested the creation of a shipyard to build tankers needed to carry the products of Sun's Marcus Hook (Pa.) refinery. He and his older brother J. Howard acquired the old Merchant's Shipyard, hired cousin John G. Pew as president, and began building tankers.

By the end of 1943, Sun Ship boasted 35,000 employees, approximately half of whom were black. More than one third of the black employees worked in the company's No. 4 facility, a yard intended by the Pews to be staffed completely by black workers. Yard No. 4 presented blacks with another instance of a recurring dilemma: should they postpone the goal of full integration for the sake of economic improvement, or should they forgo the opportunity to improve their vocational expertise and economic condition for the ultimate goal of total equality in a fully integrated society? Such a goal seemed, on the eve of the Second World War, nearly as remote as it had been at the close of the Civil War. Jim Crow ruled throughout the South. The North lacked Jim Crow laws, but discrimination and segregation were the norm rather than the exception. “What have Negroes to fight for?” A. Philip Randolph demanded in 1942. “If you haven't got democracy yourself, how can you carry it to somebody else?”

Our nation has been founded in what we may call our American religion, baptized and reared in the faith that a man requires no master to take care of him, and that common people can work out their salvation well enough together if left free to try.

William James, “Robert Gould Shaw Oration,” 1897

[T]he civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets … centered around taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country's principal goal … You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning.

Richard Rorty, “A Cultural Left,” 1997

James and Rorty refer here to what sociologists used to call the American civil religion. In 1967, Robert N. Bellah coined this phrase to suggest how Americans, shaped by the complex interplay of republican and Christian traditions, believe they have an obligation “to carry out God's will on earth.” Since the 1970s, though, it has been historians like J. G. A. Pocock who have shown how republicans throughout the modern West have for the last five centuries blended the millennialist beliefs of Christianity with the ancient conviction that humans realize their political nature through the virtuous acts required to sustain republics in a cosmos ruled by fortune. As James once said of pragmatism, republicanism is a new name for an old way of thinking.

Mack: pimp; talk someone into something

“Pimptionary,” Ice-T

Mack man: Short for Mackerel man, a pimp. Possibly from the French maquereau. Connotes the working side of pimping, especially the line, the “rap,” the psychological game.

“Pimp Talk,” Christina and Richard Milner

Mack, as these definitions attest, is synonymous with pimp and is so deployed in gangsta rap as both noun and verb. From this denotative meaning, the term has assumed secondary meanings: to persuade, or as Ice-T says “to talk someone into.” The mack comes to mean the persuader, the trickster, the rapper. This semantic shift strikes at the centre of the equivalencies between rap artist and pimp. As music critic S. H. Fernando asserts, “the one specific quality that pimps and rappers share is their way with words.” If broad parallels can be drawn between pimping and rapping, what is distinctive about the notorious and highly successful subgenre of gangsta rap, which emerged in late-1980s urban California, is that here this equivalence is literalized. Many gangsta rappers actually assume pimp personae, presenting oral narratives which fulfil both denotative and connotative meanings of the word mack.

The subtly entrapping nature of celebrity has been a common theme of Don DeLillo's work since his third novel, Great Jones Street (1973), narrated by a twenty-six-year-old rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, who tires of fame in the middle of a national tour and goes to ground in a seedy New York bedsitter. This theme, however, finds its fullest expression in DeLillo's 1991 novel Mao II, where it is linked to a specific concern which may be closer to home for him – the paradoxical fascination with author–recluses in American celebrity culture. DeLillo, who came to reluctant terms with major league celebrity from the mid-1980s onwards after a long period of respectful reviews and polite notices, has praised reclusive authors for “refusing to become part of the all-incorporating treadmill of consumption and disposal,” in spite of the “automatic mechanism” of the media which tries “to absorb certain such reluctant entities into the weave.” Mao II is about what happens when this absorption takes place, and whether or not this wholly devalues the author's own tactics of silence and renunciation.