Post-industrial America and Neo-imperialism in Russell Banks’s Novel Rule of the Bone

Russell Banks is a socially engaged writer, and one of those contemporary American authors whom Philip Roth has defined as fully dedicated to “trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible, much of the American reality”, which is interlinked with global imperialism and processes of class and racial oppression (Roth quoted in O’Donnell 2010: 34).1 In his works, Russell Banks, not surprisingly,