Abstract
The monograph discusses the uses of ruins in the U.S. culture and analysing discourses, in which ruins appear as historical monuments, literary representations, material objects, themes of mainstream or popular artworks, signs of collective memory or products of economic and social processes, such as urbanization and (de)industrialization. These discourses include apocalyptic myths and their modern, catastrophic and dystopian derivatives, grand narratives about the conquest of the West and the historical mission of the U.S., but also alternative histories, local anecdotes or tall tales.