ABSTRACT
Conspiracy has always loomed large in American culture. Not only was Colonial American rhetoric frequently animated by conspiratorial demonology, but, as numerous scholars have shown, conspiratorial suspicion was a normative feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political thought. It should be no surprise, therefore, that so many durable American literary works explore suspicion, hidden plots and organised systems for social or political control. What is more striking, however, is the veritable explosion of literary and cultural interest in conspiracy that characterised the period beginning roughly in 1960 (see Fenster 1999; Melley 2000; Knight 2000; O’Donnell 2000). Not only did conspiracy become an explicit organising principle in the most celebrated fictions of the post-Kennedy era, but this literature frequently embraced self-conscious paranoia as a reasonable response to state and corporate power.
