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. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1 Production CHAPTER ONE How the Communist Party Shaped Gwendolyn Brooks’s Early Writing (MARY HELEN WASHINGTON) CHAPTER TWO The Cold War Encyclopedic Novel (JEFFREY SEVERS) CHAPTER THREE Cold War Technology and Women Poets (LINDA A. KINNAHAN) CHAPTER FOUR The American Long Poem Evolves, 1945–90: Cold War, Hot War, (No War), Pure War (EDWARD BRUNNER) CHAPTER FIVE Butler, Le Guin, and Feminist Science Fiction of the Cold War (KATLYN WILLIAMS) CHAPTER SIX Cold War Spy Fiction: The Ethics of Fighting Fire with Fire (SKIP WILLMAN) CHAPTER SEVEN American Jewish Writers and the Eastern Bloc: The Dissident Generation (BRIAN K. GOODMAN) CHAPTER EIGHT Writing the Cold War in the American Academic Novel (IAN BUTCHER) Part 2 Circulation CHAPTER NINE Anglo-American Propaganda and the Transition from the Second World War to the Cultural Cold War (JAMES SMITH AND CHAPTER TEN Book Diplomacy: Soviet–American Publishing Relations and the Moscow Book Exhibitions in the Late Cold War (BIRGIT CHAPTER ELEVEN Closets, Pulps, and the Gay Internationale: The “Homintern” (JAIME HARKER) CHAPTER TWELVE Librarians, Library Diplomacy, and the Cultural Cold War, 1950–70 (AMANDA LAUGESEN) CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Transcription Centre and the Coproduction of African Literary Culture in the 1960s (ASHA ROGERS) CHAPTER FOURTEEN Creative Writing and the Cold War: Rebels with Transcripts (ERIC BENNETT) CHAPTER FIFTEEN How Chinese Letters Traveled to Iowa City: Hualing Nieh’s Transpacific Crossings (YI-HUNG LIU) CHAPTER SIXTEEN William Faulkner as Cold War Cultural Ambassador: “In between propaganda and escapism” (DEBORAH COHN) Part 3 Reception CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Distribution and Reception of American Literature in Cold War Japan (HIROMI OCHI) CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Making a Literary Working Class in the Cultural Cold War: The Australasian Book Society (NICOLE MOORE) CHAPTER NINETEEN Anti-Apartheid Imagination, the Cold War, and African Literary Magazines (CHRISTOPHER E. W. OUMA) CHAPTER TWENTY Cuban Revolutionaries Read US Writers: Bohemian Mondays (RUSSELL COBB) CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Struggles for “Cultural Freedom” in Cold War India: Fostering a Critical Spirit in the Liberal Journals of t CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Robinson Jeffers’s Pilgrimage through the Iron Curtain: The Beloved Shepherd (JIRINA ŠMEJKALOVÁ) CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Reading for Freedom in Cold War America (KRISTIN L. MATTHEWS) Contributors Index