Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures

About this book

"Telling the story of the late 20th century with a particular focus on the institutions involved in the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature, this book asks how the Cold War shaped literature and literary production, and how literature affected the course of the Cold War. Adopting a book historical approach to its subject, this collection uses institutions like MFA programs, university literature departments, book-review sections of newspapers, publishing houses, non-governmental cultural agencies, libraries, and literary magazines as a way to understand works of the period differently. Broad in both its geographical range and the range of writers it examines, essays look at works of mainstream American literary fiction from writers such as Roth, Updike and Bellow, as well as moving beyond the U.S. to look at lesser-known writers working in what was then the periphery of the Cold War's European theater in places like India, South Africa, and Taiwan. Familiar writers appear in sometimes unexpected ways-Faulkner as a Cold War diplomat; Auden as a member of the so-called "homintern" of leftist gay writers; and Robinson Jeffers as a catalyst of Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution." And underscoring how English became the lingua franca of Western literary culture in the Cold War, other essays will move beyond the U.K. and U.S. to detail how writers and readers from Taiwan, Japan, Uganda, South Africa, India, Cuba, the USSR, and the Czech Republic engaged with and contributed to Anglo-American literary traditions and texts."--