American Writers and the Approach of World War II, 1935-1941: A Literary History

Description

Ichiro Takayoshi's book argues that World War II transformed American literary culture. From the mid-1930s to the American entry into World War II in 1941, pre-eminent figures from Ernest Hemingway to Reinhold Neibuhr responded to the turn of the public's interest from the economic depression at home to the menace of totalitarian systems abroad by producing novels, short stories, plays, poems, and cultural criticism in which they prophesied the coming of a second world war and explored how America could prepare for it. The variety of competing answers offered a rich legacy of idioms, symbols, and standard arguments that were destined to license America's promotion of its values and interests around the world for the rest of the twentieth century. Ambitious in scope and addressing an enormous range of writers, thinkers, and artists, this book is the first to establish the outlines of American culture during this pivotal period.

Ichiro Takayoshi is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University. His articles on modern US literature have appeared in academic journals such as Post45 and Representations. Takayoshi has also translated into Japanese the works of Don DeLillo, David Mitchell and Richard Powers.

'... Takayoshi has done us a service in detailing the rhetorical history of a heretofore murky yet significant period in American literary expression.' George Hutchinson, The Review of English Studies Takayoshi does an impressive job situating the work of several U.S. writers in the context of rapidly changing international events. Moreover, as a project that locates a diverse group of U.S. writers in a global context, Takayoshi's book is an exemplary model of transnational U.S. Scholarship. Scholars of U.S. intellectual and literary history will find much to appreciate in its pages.' Holly Allen, The American Historical Review 'American Writers and the Approach of World War II is a masterful literary history: it manages to be comprehensive without sacrificing depth and encyclopedic without descending into mere accumulation.' James Dawes, American Literature