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Look Inside American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950

American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950

Part of American Literature in Transition

Editor: Christopher Vials, University of Connecticut

Christopher Vials, Glenn Mitoma, Josh Lambert, Benjamin Balthaser, Alex Goodall, Christian Appy, Bill Mullen, Floyd Cheung, James Smethurst, Julia L. Mickenberg, Aaron Lecklider, Kathy Olmsted, Sarah Ehlers, Sean McCann, Alan Wald, Philip Beidler, Erin Smith, Judith Smith, Joan Saab

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Date Published: December 2017
availability: This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
format: Adobe eBook Reader
isbn: 9781108548601

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Description

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About the Authors

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States emerged as the dominant imperial power, and in US popular memory, the Second World War is remembered more vividly than the American Revolution. American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 provides crucial contexts for interpreting the literature of this period. Essays from scholars in literature, history, art history, ethnic studies, and American studies show how writers intervened in the global struggles of the decade: the Second World War, the Cold War, and emerging movements over racial justice, gender and sexuality, labor, and de-colonization. One recurrent motif is the centrality of the political impulse in art and culture. Artists and writers participated widely in left and liberal social movements that fundamentally transformed the terms of social life in the twentieth century, not by advocating specific legislation, but by changing underlying cultural values. This book addresses all the political impulses fueling art and literature at the time, as well as the development of new forms and media, from modernism and noir to radio and the paperback.
- Features canonical, non-canonical, and emergent authors of the 1940s
- Uses literature to highlight the historical open-endedness of the period, allowing readers to see that transitions such as the move from WWII antifascism to Cold War anticommunism was not inevitable, but contested and negotiated via works of the imagination
- Is attuned to the transnational turn in American literary studies and American studies, allowing readers to see 'American literature' as global project, one that intervened not only in a rarefied world of arts and letters, but in US projects outside its borders
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Product details
- Date Published: December 2017
- format: Adobe eBook Reader
- isbn: 9781108548601
- contains: 4 b/w illus.
- availability: This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
Part I. The United States in the World:
1. Why We Fight: contending narratives of the Second World War Christopher Vials
2. Human rights in American political discourse Glenn Mitoma
3. Fictions of anti-semitism and the beginning of Holocaust literature Josh Lambert
4. The fatal machine: the postwar imperial state and the radical novel Benjamin Balthaser
5. Antifascism as a political grammar and cultural force Christopher Vials
6. From confession to exposure: transitions in anticommunist literature Alex Goodall
7. The contested origins of the Atomic Age and the Cold War Christian Appy
Part II. Emergent Publics:
8. Cross currents: WWII and the increasing visibility of race Bill Mullen
9. Good Asian/bad Asian: Asian American racial formation Floyd Cheung
10. Social realism, the Ghetto, and African American literature James Smethurst
11. From factory to home? The crisis in the gendered division of labor Julia L. Mickenberg
12. Public excursions in fierce truth-telling: literary cultures and homosexuality Aaron Lecklider
13. Resurgence: conservatives organize against the new deal Kathy Olmsted
Part III. Media and Genre:
14. Late modernisms, latent realisms: the politics of literary interpretation Sarah Ehlers
15. The city in the literary imagination Sean McCann
16. Noir and the ebb of radical hope Alan Wald
17. Narrating the war Philip Beidler
18. Paperbacks and the literary marketplace Erin Smith
19. Literary radicals in Radio's public sphere Judith Smith
20. The state cultural apparatus: federal funding of arts and letters Joan Saab.
Look Inside
Editor
Christopher Vials, University of Connecticut
Christopher Vials is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where he also serves as Director of American Studies. He is the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (2014), for which he was recently interviewed on NPR and CBC Radio. He is also author of Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture 1935–1947 (2009), and his work has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Criticism, Science and Society, and other venues.
Contributors
Christopher Vials, Glenn Mitoma, Josh Lambert, Benjamin Balthaser, Alex Goodall, Christian Appy, Bill Mullen, Floyd Cheung, James Smethurst, Julia L. Mickenberg, Aaron Lecklider, Kathy Olmsted, Sarah Ehlers, Sean McCann, Alan Wald, Philip Beidler, Erin Smith, Judith Smith, Joan Saab