Conspiracy theories are everywhere in postwar American culture. From postmodern novels to The X-Files, and from gangsta rap to feminist polemic, there is a widespread suspicion that sinister forces are conspiring to take control of our national destiny, our minds, and even our bodies. Conspiracy explanations can no longer be dismissed as the paranoid delusions of far-right crackpots. Indeed, they have become a necessary response to a risky and increasingly globalized world, in which everything is connected but nothing adds up.
Through an engaging and cogent analysis of books such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Don DeLillo's Underworld, movies such as Oliver Stone's JFK, the Internet, and other forms of popular culture, Peter Knight explores how conspiracy culture has developed, from the 1960s' countercultural suspicions about the authorities to the 1990s, where a paranoid attitude is both routine and ironic. Conspiracy Culture analyzes conspiracy narratives about familiar
