Kennedy Assassination

November 22nd 1963, Dealey Plaza As a seminal event in late twentieth-century American history, the Kennedy assassination has permeated the American and world consciousness in a wide variety of ways. It has long fascinated American writers, filmmakers and artists, and this book offers an authoritative critical introduction to the way the event has been constructed in a range of discourses. It looks at a variety of historical, political and cultural attempts to understand Kennedy's death. Representations include: journalism from the time; historical accounts and memoirs; official investigations, government reports and sociological inquiries; the huge number of conspiracy-minded interpretations; novels, plays and other works of literature; and the Zapruder footage, photography, avant-garde art, and Hollywood films. Considering the continuities and contradictions in how the event has been represented, the author focuses on how it has been seen through the lens of ideas about conspiracy, celebrity and violence.He also explores how the arguments about exactly what happened on 22 November 1963 have come to serve as a substitute way of debating the significance of Kennedy's legacy and the meaning of the 1960s more generally. Key Features: * presents information about the event itself, the cultural context of the period, and the consequences of the event * considers the ways in which the event has been represented in subsequent years in a variety of discourses * includes an annotated bibliography and 10 B&W illustrations.

'Peter Knight has done the impossible - he has written a very interesting and readable book on the Kennedy Assassination. Comprehensive though never obsessive, sharply analytic but not cranky or opinionated, and written in a lively yet authoritative style, The Kennedy Assassination will prove indispensable not only to students and researchers of American politics and culture over the last half century, but also to the general reader.' Richard H. King, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham 'Peter Knight's book on the Kennedy assassination is the best available source we have on the most symptomatic event of postwar American history. Encyclopedic in scope, elegant and clear in its execution, wide-ranging in its assessment of the history and representational aftermath of that dark day in Dallas, this will be the "go-to" book on the Kennedy assassination for some time to come.' Patrick O'Donnell, Chair of the Department of English, Michigan State

Peter Knight is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester. He is author of Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to The X-Files (2000) and editor of Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (2002), Conspiracy Theories in American Culture: An Encyclopedia (2003) and Fakes and Forgeries (2004).