American Fantastic challenges readers to recognize an organizing myth in America’s perception of its imperialist past, “the myth of redemptive violence.” Derek J. Thiess persuasively argues that this myth serves to obscure the deep thread of Christian supremacy that underwrites America’s colonial and imperial impulses, from the early colonial period to westward expansion to the contemporary global order. This American imaginary, which enmeshes religion with violence, is constructed in multiple contentious and productive contact zones: between genres, between cultures, and between past and present.

Thiess’s interdisciplinary study examines America’s past and present imperial projects, from the Hawaiian Islands to the Eastern Seaboard, as they proliferate in popular story forms. By interrogating American myths, legends, and fantastic narratives across an impressive array of genres, including folk narratives, science fiction, movies, and more, Thiess exposes how the “myth of redemptive violence” manifests in contemporary constructions of America’s fantastic imaginaries.

Derek J. Thiess is an associate professor of English at the University of North Georgia. He is the author of Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction; Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach; and Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography.

Introduction 
Chapter 1: Violence and Redemption at the Edge: SF Sport and Mo‘olelo Nalu 
Chapter 2: Closer to Center: The Franklin Expedition, Myth, and the Embodied Horrors of History 
Chapter 3: Myth and Violence on the Homefront: The John Henry Legend 
Chapter 4: “Only the Devil and I”: Pirates, Missionaries, and the Blackbeard Legend  
Chapter 5: Bootstaps and Pederasts: Child Protectionism and the Horatio Alger Myth 
Chapter 6: From Defecation to Deification: Religion and Empire in Torture Porn  
Conclusion 
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index