About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
SECTION 1: PRODUCTION
1. How the Communist Party Shaped Gwendolyn Brooks’s Early Writing: Mary Helen Washington
2. The Cold War Encyclopedic Novel: Jeffrey Severs, University of British Columbia (Canada)
3. Cold War Technology and Women Poets: Linda Kinnahan, Duquesne University (USA)
4. The American Long Poem Evolves, 1945-1990: Ed Brunner, Southern Illinois University (USA)
5. Butler, Le Guin, and Feminist Science Fiction of the Cold War: Katlyn Williams, University of Iowa (USA)
6. Cold War Spy Fiction: Skip Willman, University of South Dakota
7. American Jewish Writers and the Eastern Bloc: Brian Goodman, Arizona State University (USA)
8. Writing the Cold War in the American Academic Novel: Ian Butcher, Fanshawe University (Canada)
SECTION II: CIRCULATION
9. Anglo-American Propaganda and the Transition from the Second World War to the Cultural Cold War: James Smith and Guy Woodward, Durham University (UK)
10. Book Diplomacy: Rósa Magnúsdóttir and Birgitte Beck Pristed, Aarhus University (Denmark)
11. Closets, Pulps, and the Gay Internationale: Jaime Harker, University of Mississippi (USA)
12. Librarians, Library Diplomacy, and the Cultural Cold War, 1950–1970: Amanda Laugesen, Australian National University (Australia)
13. The Transcription Centre and the Co-Production of African Literary Culture in the 1960s: Asha Rogers, University of Birmingham (UK)
14. Creative Writing and the Cold War: Eric Bennett, Providence College (USA)
15. How Chinese Letters Traveled to Iowa City: P Yi-hung Liu, Academia Sinica (Taiwan)
16. William Faulkner as Cold War Cultural Ambassador: Deborah Cohn, Indiana University (USA)
SECTION III: RECEPTION
17. The Distribution and Reception of American Literature in Cold War Japan: Hiromi Ochi, Senshu University, Tokyo (Japan)
18. Making a Literary Working Class in the Cultural Cold War: Nicole Moore, University of New South Wales (Australia)
19. Anti-Apartheid Imagination, the Cold War-era, and African Literary Magazines: Christopher Ouma, University of Cape Town (South Africa)
20. Cuban Revolutionaries Read U.S. Writers: Russell Cobb, University of Alberta (Canada)
21. “Cultural Freedom” in Cold War India: Laetitia Zecchini, CNRS Paris (France)
22. Robinson Jeffers’s Journey behind the Iron Curtain: Jirina Smejkalova, Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic)
23. Reading for Freedom in Cold War America: Kristin Matthews, Brigham Young University (USA)
About the Author :
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.
Review :
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.
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.
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.
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.
