American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950

This collection provides crucial contexts for interpreting the literature of the 1940s, showing how writers intervened in the global struggles of the decade.

Christopher Vials (Edited by)

9781107143319, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 December 2017

380 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.6 x 16 x 2.4 cm, 0.76 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]