The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures

Description

Adopting a unique historical approach to its subject and with a particular focus on the institutions involved in the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature, this handbook surveys the way in which the Cold War shaped literature and literary production, and how literature affected the course of the Cold War. To do so, in addition to more 'traditional' sources it 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 their geographical range and the range of writers they cover, the book's essays examine works of mainstream American literary fiction from writers such as Roth, Updike and Faulkner, as well as moving beyond the U.S. and the U.K. to detail how writers and readers from countries including, but not limited to, Taiwan, Japan, Uganda, South Africa, India, Cuba, the USSR, and the Czech Republic engaged with and contributed to Anglo-American literary texts and institutions.

Greg Barnhisel is Professor of English at Duquesne University, USA. He is an internationally known scholar of the history of the book, modernism and the cultural Cold War, with two monographs on those topics. In 2010, he edited an anthology entitled Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War. He is one of the editors of the journal Book History and a series editor for the 'Studies in Print Culture and the History or the Book' series at the University of Massachusetts Press.

This handbook offers a major new reading of Cold War literature which moves right away from a view of the period as one restricted by narrow political polarities. Its coverage is global, enabling it to present an informatively diverse survey of Cold War writing which connects at every point with the cultural contexts of this literature. -- Professor David Seed, University of Liverpool, UK Greg Barnhisel has gathered an astonishing compendium of Cold War book history and literary criticism, led by what will be recognized as his landmark introduction. Especially welcome is the extensive work done here on global literary institutions, from nonprofit foundations to conglomerate publishers to sites like the Transcription Centre, which produced English-language cultural content for distribution in newly independent African countries. We find familiar authors in less familiar contexts: William Faulkner is big in Japan; Robinson Jeffers is big in Czechoslovakia; US Jewish writers found rejuvenation in the Eastern bloc. Extremely useful for scholars of post-1945 anglophone literatures and anyone teaching about literature and the Cold War. -- Dan Sinykin, Assistant Professor of English, Emory University, USA This book is monumental in every sense of the word-smartly organized around the broad categories of Production, Circulation, and Reception, it presents a refreshing variety of perspectives on Cold War "literary cultures." Ranging from granular discussions of encyclopedic novels and spy fiction, from queer pulps to the institutionalization of "creative writing," to the reverberations of Cold War in places like Japan, India, Cuba, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures is dazzling in scope, and will be absolutely essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Cold War literature and culture. -- Steven Belletto, author of No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures expands the boundaries of American literary studies by staging a nuanced reckoning with American and Soviet soft power during that hardly cold but terribly long war. Postcolonial, global Anglophone studies and American studies have historically been strange bedfellows but the wide-ranging and compelling essays in this collection foreground the latent intimacies, the marriages of convenience and strategic alliances that will push us to redraw our literary world maps. This book joins the decisive and much-needed canon of exciting new works about the Cold War by making visible an array of circuits and transmissions that have revolutionized large literary, historical and cultural categories. * Bhakti Shringarpure, Associate Professor of English & Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Connecticut, USA *