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This chapter observes Tropic of Orange complicating Asian American fictional interethnicity on a transnational scale. Set in a region that extends from the Tropic of Cancer across the U.S.‐Mexico border to Los Angeles, the novel is a magical allegory of the mass migration of peoples of the Southern Hemisphere to the North. In a plot that brings a cast of thousands into comic and disastrous cross‐national and interethnic encounter, the arrival of Spanish‐speaking, magic‐tinged characters from the South wreaks havoc on notions of identity and even geographical stability for a range of U.S. ethnic characters in L.A. Ultimately, Yamashita offers an ethical politics derived from a vision of human subsumption in a wider, natural ecology that transcends national borders. In this vision, the “natural” convergence of peoples creates a collective imagination that is itself a kind of organism, the growth of which is both grotesque and sublime. In her L.A. disaster plot, this media‐age popular imagination plays itself out in multiple, simultaneous, gargantuan, and tragicomic mass events, in the aftermath of which, Yamashita's closing attention to a precious, vulnerable transnational family unit honors “natural” human community, on a global scale.

This introductory chapter argues that Indian illustrations in the pictorial press were part of the social and cultural machinery that produced and reinforced an enduring set of Indian stereotypes and visual tropes in the American popular imagination, reinforcing the ways that white Americans understood Native Americans and their place in U.S. society. Such pictures were a significant part of this meaning-making process because they frequently depicted Indians and Indian life in popular but narrowly conceived ways. By describing and analyzing the various themes and visual tropes across the years of the illustrated press, this book provides a deeper understanding of the racial codes and visual signs that white Americans used to represent Native Americans in an era of western expansion and manifest destiny.

This book examines the metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and that continue to haunt the Western literary imagination. An initial investigation of Italy in nineteenth-century Europe raised a host of questions that have sustained this study. In addressing such questions, the book aims to provide the first work in English that considers Italian Romanticism and, more broadly, the modern myth of Italy in a comparative European context. In both popular imagination and historical fact, cliches about Italy continue simultaneously to attract us to the Peninsula and to thwart us from an informed understanding of it. This oscillation between seduction and misunderstanding defines the reception of Italy's contentious Romantic movement.

Chapter 2 locates the inquiry within a research context, specifically the ‘narrative imagination’ that is required from researchers as we embark on journeys exploring the different worldviews of others. Using the metaphor of the performance of magic, the chapter reflects on those moments when we knowingly suspend disbelief, and let ourselves travel to implausible, impossible places. As researchers, how do we balance the tension between our willingness to believe others—no matter how distant their experiences might be from our own—and critical detachment, even scepticism? Are there limits to how far we should be willing to travel into the worlds of others? This chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of imagination in scholarship.

This chapter addresses the question of why Herculaneum failed to capture popular imagination. It suggests that the reasons are not merely to do with the relatively small size of the site, but go back to the roots of tourism in the eighteenth century. The submergence of Herculaneum in the popular imagination is due to a series of interconnected factors, as part of a paradigm shift that took place in the 1760s: that it was connected with the departure of Charles Bourbon to take up the throne of Spain, and the accession of his son Ferdinand IV in 1759; that it was linked to the public relations disaster of Winckelmann's Sendschreiben of 1762 and its French translation in 1764; to the death of Karl Weber in 1764, and to the arrival of Sir William Hamilton in Naples in the same year; and that it involved a major rethinking by the Bourbon regime of the purpose of excavation, which grasped the popular appeal of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, excavated in 1765, and exploited the new wave of Grand Tourism made possible by the peace of Paris of 1763.

Chapter Three explores Cuba’s image within the U.S. radical imaginary through the surge of airplane hijackings that occurred from the U.S. to Cuba between 1968 and 1973. Seeking political asylum, sanctuary from criminal charges, contact with Third World revolutionary movements, and apolitical adventure, Americans who hijacked airplanes to Cuba often framed air piracy as an act of political protest. Cuban immigration officials were not always convinced, however, viewing many hijackers as criminals, not revolutionaries. Making ninety attempts to reach Cuba in commandeered aircraft, American air pirates ultimately forced the U.S. and Cuban governments into unprecedented high-level negotiations despite the nations’ lack of diplomatic relations. Viewing hijacking as a liability, the Cuban government moved to counter its outlaw mystique in the American popular imagination, with the two governments signing a bilateral agreement to curb hijacking in 1973.

This chapter traces the pervasiveness of the royal family as a cultural and global phenomenon, looking at its past and present embeddedness in the popular imagination. With the increasing democratization of the monarchy, royal consumers can make a vast array of choices in the marketplace, and the types of engagement range from the mainstream to the downright eccentric. This chapter also presents a conceptualization of the royal family as a composite of five types of brands: global, human, family, heritage, and luxury. Referring to this entity as the Royal Family Brand Complex (RFBC), the authors argue these various components are key to understanding the continuing fascination with the royal family.

Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony has fascinated the musical world not only by its beauty but also through its rediscovery in the 1860s and the myths that have evolved around its composition. Firstly there is the rumour of a ‘hidden’ symphony—an accusation that goes back to Kreißle von Hellborn, who blamed the Hüttenbrenner brothers of holding back the most precious ‘perls’ of Schubert’s oeuvre. Secondly, there is a mystical relation to Beethoven which recurred in popular literature on Schubert, culminating in a scene of the film Das Dreimäderlhaus (1958) in which we see Schubert abandoning the composition of the symphony at the same time Beethoven was considered definitely to be deaf. Finally, the ‘Unfinished’ retains the nimbus of being a Sterbefragment—a work that was not finished because the composer died while working on it. Collectively, these myths form an important part of its reception history and contributed to its fame.