The Great American Makeover

The Great American Makeover explores two basic questions: How do myths of self-reinvention shape America's past, and how do contemporary television makeover programs continue and question this long-standing tendency to celebrate the fundamental powers of American transformation? This collection demonstrates that the makeover mythos is a crucial link between earlier and emergent forms and processes of engagement with the national imaginary. It demonstrates the tenacity of the American fantasy of recreation and its enduring ability to speak to our shifting national desires and anxieties. At the same time, the volume speaks to American popular television's own enduring ability to reinvent itself.

The Great American Makeover explores two basic questions: How do myths of self-reinvention shape America s past, and how do contemporary television makeover programs continue and question this long-standing tendency to celebrate the fundamental powers of American transformation? This collection demonstrates that the makeover mythos is a crucial link between earlier and emergent forms and processes of engagement with the national imaginary. It demonstrates the tenacity of the American fantasy of recreation and its enduring ability to speak to our shifting national desires and anxieties. At the same time, the volume speaks to American popular television s own enduring ability to reinvent itself.

Dana Heller is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She is the author of The Femininization of Quest Romance: Radical Departures, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culure, and the editor of Cross Purpose: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance, The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity (Palgrave Macmillan), and Makeover Television: Realities Remodeled.