The Electoral Imagination: Literature, Legitimacy, and Other Rigged Systems

What happens when we vote? What are we counting when we count ballots? Who decides what an election should look like and what it should mean? And why do so many people believe that some or all elections are rigged? Moving between intellectual history, literary criticism, and political theory, The Electoral Imagination offers a critical account of the decisions before the decision, of the aesthetic and imaginative choices that inform and, in some cases, determine the nature and course of democratic elections. Drawing on original interpretations of George Eliot and Ralph Ellison, Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Arrow, Anthony Trollope and Arthur Koestler, Richard Nixon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Palm Beach Butterfly Ballot and the Single Transferable Vote, The Electoral Imagination works both to understand the systems we use to move between the one and the many and to offer an alternative to the 'myth of rigging.'

ISBN-13: 9781009206655

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Publication Date: 10-13-2022

Pages: 380

Product Dimensions: 6.22(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.98(d)

Kent Puckett is author of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2008), War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939–1945 (2017), and Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (2016), winner of the 2018 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, MLQ, Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, Public Books, and other journals.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: rigging the system; 2. Seeing aspects: considering some kinds of electoral realism; 3. Electoral things: realism, representation, and the Victorian ballot; 4. Late returns: Lewis Carroll and William Morris; 5. The Impossibilists: Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Arrow; 6. Conclusion: a silent majority.