American Literature And Culture In An Age Of Cold War

Author : Steven Belletto
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609381440
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War written by Steven Belletto and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time is right for a critical reassessment of Cold War culture both because its full cultural impact remains unprocessed and because some of the chief paradigms for understanding that culture confuse rather than clarify. A collection of the work of some of the best cultural critics writing about the period, American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War reveals a broad range of ways that American cultural production from the late 1940s to the present might be understood in relation to the Cold War. Critically engaging the reigning paradigms that equate postwar U.S. culture with containment culture, the authors present suggestive revisionist claims. Their essays draw on a literary archive—including the works of John Updike, Joan Didion, Richard E. Kim, Allen Ginsberg, Edwin Denby, Alice Childress, Frank Herbert, and others—strikingly different from the one typically presented in accounts of the period. Likewise, the authors describe phenomena—such as the FBI’s surveillance of writers (especially African Americans), biopolitics, development theory, struggles over the centralization and decentralization of government, and the cultural work of Reaganism—that open up new contexts for discussing postwar culture. Extending the timeline and expanding the geographic scope of Cold War culture, this book reveals both the literature and the culture of the time to be more dynamic and complex than has been generally supposed.

Author : Denis Jonnes
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317649478
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture written by Denis Jonnes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demands placed on many young Americans as a result of the Cold War give rise to an increasingly age-segregated society. This separation allowed adolescents and young adults to begin to formulate an identity distinct from previous generations, and was a significant factor in their widespread rejection of contemporary American society. This study traces the emergence of a distinctive post-war family dynamic between parent and adolescent or already adult child. In-depth readings of individual writers such as, Arthur Miller, William Styron, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and Sylvia Plath, situate their work in relation to the Cold War and suggest how the figuring of adolescents and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of American youth. This book is a superb research tool for any student or academic with an interest in youth culture, cultural studies, American studies, cold war studies, twentieth-century American literature, history of the family, and age studies.

Author : Lary May
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226511766
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Recasting America written by Lary May and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The freshness of the authors' approaches . . . is salutary. . . . The collection is stimulating and valuable."—Joan Shelley Rubin, Journal of American History

Author : John Hay
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316997421
Total Pages : 590 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture written by John Hay and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of America has always encouraged apocalyptic visions. The 'American Dream' has not only imagined the prospect of material prosperity; it has also imagined the end of the world. 'Final forecasts' constitute one of America's oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This book brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.

Author : Steven Belletto
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609381130
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War written by Steven Belletto and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authors and artists discussed include: Joseph Conrad, Edwin Denby, Joan Didion, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Berbert, Richard Kim, Norman Mailer, Malcolm X, Alan Nadel, and John Updike,

Author : Daniel Cordle
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 113751308X
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Late Cold War Literature and Culture written by Daniel Cordle and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the 1980s as a nuclear decade, focusing on British and United States fiction. Ranging across genres including literary fiction, science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, graphic novels, children’s and young adult literature, thrillers and horror, it shows how pressing nuclear issues were, particularly the possibility of nuclear war, and how deeply they penetrated the culture. It is innovative for its discussion of a “nuclear transatlantic,” placing British and American texts in dialogue with one another, for its identification of a vibrant young adult fiction that resonates with more conventionally studied literatures of the period and for its analysis of a “politics of vulnerability” animating nuclear debates. Placing nuclear literature in social and historical contexts, it shows how novels and short stories responded not only to nuclear fears, but also crystallised contemporary debates about issues of gender, the environment, society and the economy.

Author : Alan Nadel
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822316992
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Containment Culture written by Alan Nadel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history. Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine, from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as Catch–22 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. An important work of cultural criticism, Containment Culture links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation’s cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.

Author : Peter J. Kuznick
Publisher : Smithsonian Institution
ISBN 13 : 1588344150
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rethinking Cold War Culture written by Peter J. Kuznick and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of essays questions many widespread assumptions about the culture of postwar America. Illuminating the origins and development of the many threads that constituted American culture during the Cold War, the contributors challenge the existence of a monolithic culture during the 1950s and thereafter. They demonstrate instead that there was more to American society than conformity, political conservatism, consumerism, and middle-class values. By examining popular culture, politics, economics, gender relations, and civil rights, the contributors contend that, while there was little fundamentally new about American culture in the Cold War era, the Cold War shaped and distorted virtually every aspect of American life. Interacting with long-term historical trends related to demographics, technological change, and economic cycles, four new elements dramatically influenced American politics and culture: the threat of nuclear annihilation, the use of surrogate and covert warfare, the intensification of anticommunist ideology, and the rise of a powerful military-industrial complex. This provocative dialogue by leading historians promises to reshape readers' understanding of America during the Cold War, revealing a complex interplay of historical norms and political influences.

Author : Tom Engelhardt
Publisher : Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN 13 : 9781558491335
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The End of Victory Culture written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sets out to trace the vicissitudes of America's self-image since World War ll as they showed up in popular culture: war toys, war comics, war reporting, and war films. It succeeds brilliantly ... Engelhardt's prose is smart and smooth, and his book is social and cultural history of a high order." Boston Globe, from the bookjacket.

Author : Daniel Grausam
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813931665
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Endings written by Daniel Grausam and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2011-08-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does narrative look like when the possibility of an expansive future has been called into question? This query is the driving force behind Daniel Grausam’s On Endings, which seeks to show how the core texts of American postmodernism are a response to the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War and especially to the new potential for total nuclear conflict. Postwar American fiction needs to be rethought, he argues, by highlighting postmodern experimentation as a mode of profound historical consciousness. In Grausam’s view, previous studies of fiction mimetically concerned with nuclear conflict neither engage the problems that total war might pose to narration nor take seriously the paradox of a war that narrative can never actually describe. Those few critical works that do take seriously such problems do not offer a broad account of American postmodernism. And recent work on postmodernism has offered no comprehensive historical account of the part played by nuclear weapons in the emergence of new forms of temporal and historical experience. On Endings significantly extends the project of historicizing postmodernism while returning the nuclear to a central place in the study of the Cold War.