PARAMILITARY ACTION-ADVENTURE FICTION: A HISTORY

We are all familiar with the idea of the action hero as a latterday avenger with a gun—Dirty Harry, Chuck Norris' screen heroes, Rambo. Yet, how did the idea of such heroes emerge in the first place? Why did it explode as it did in the 1970s and, still more, the 1980s, defining the Hollywood action films of that decade? And why did it fall out of fashion?

PARAMILITARY ACTION-ADVENTURE FICTION: A HISTORY examines all these questions, and much more, as it traces the rise of paramilitary action heroes in the tensions and fears underlying the civil image of the nineteenth century, through the stresses of the world wars and the Cold War, to the emergence by the 1960s of commandos fighting undeclared wars on the streets of urban America—and the evolution of that image in the half century since.

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