Kent Puckett is Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford University Press, 2008), Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2016), War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939–1945 (Fordham University Press, 2017), and The Electoral Imagination: Literature, Legitimacy, and Other Rigged Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Kent Puckett
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Writing on Public Books
B-Sides: Reading, Race, and “Robert’s Rules of Order”
The famous guidebook of rules, motions, and meetings has a darker history than you might think.
J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands
In 1919, those crafting the fate of postwar Europe wanted their designs to be hidden from view. Fortunately, Keynes had other plans.
Why Nixon Is Tricky for Novelists
We have Nixon to kick around again. During the election and then early presidency of Donald Trump …












