This book offers a comprehensive guide to global literary engagement with the Cold War. Eschewing the common focus on national cultures, the collection defines Cold War literature as an international current focused on the military and ideological conflicts of the age and characterised by styles and approaches that transcended national borders. Drawing on specialists from across the world, the volume analyses the period’s fiction, poetry, drama and autobiographical writings in three sections: dominant concerns (socialism, decolonisation, nuclearism, propaganda, censorship, espionage), common genres (postmodernism, socialism realism, dystopianism, migrant poetry, science fiction, testimonial writing) and regional cultures (Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe and the Americas). In doing so, the volume forms a landmark contribution to Cold War literary studies which will appeal to all those working on literature of the 1945-1989 period, including specialists in comparative literature, postcolonial literature, contemporary literature and regional literature.

This book analyses the 1980s as a nuclear decade, focusing on British and United States fiction. Ranging across genres including literary fiction, science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, graphic novels, children’s and young adult literature, thrillers and horror, it shows how pressing nuclear issues were, particularly the possibility of nuclear war, and how deeply they penetrated the culture. It is innovative for its discussion of a “nuclear transatlantic,” placing British and American texts in dialogue with one another, for its identification of a vibrant young adult fiction that resonates with more conventionally studied literatures of the period and for its analysis of a “politics of vulnerability” animating nuclear debates. Placing nuclear literature in social and historical contexts, it shows how novels and short stories responded not only to nuclear fears, but also crystallised contemporary debates about issues of gender, the environment, society and the economy.

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.

In countries worldwide, the Cold War dominated politics, society and culture during the second half of the twentieth century. Global Cold War Literatures offers a unique look at the multiple ways in which writers from Asia, Africa, Europe and North and South America addressed the military conflicts, revolutions, propaganda wars and ideological debates of the era. While including essays on western European and North American literature, the volume views First World writing, not as central to the period, but as part of an international discussion of Cold War realities in which the most interesting contributions often came from marginal or subordinate cultures. To this end, there is an emphasis on the literatures of the Second and Third Worlds, including essays on Latin American poetry, Soviet travel writing, Chinese autobiography, African theatre, North Korean literature, Cuban and eastern European fiction, and Middle Eastern fiction and poetry. With the post-Cold War era still in a condition of emergence, it is essential that we look back to the 1945-89 period to understand the political and cultural forces that shaped the modern world. The volume’s analysis of those forces and its focus on many of the ‘hot spots’ – Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea – that define the contemporary ‘war on terror’, make this an essential resources for those working in Postcolonial, American and English Literatures, as well as in History, Comparative Literature, European Studies and Cultural Studies. Global Cold War Literatures is a suitable companion volume to Hammond's Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict, also available from Routledge.

How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka—carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work. Kalliney looks at how the United States and the Soviet Union, in an effort to court writers, funded international conferences, arts centers, book and magazine publishing, literary prizes, and radio programming. International spy networks, however, subjected these same writers to surveillance and intimidation by tracking their movements, tapping their phones, reading their mail, and censoring or banning their work. Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions, deportations, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government agents. Although conventional wisdom suggests that cold war pressures stunted the development of postcolonial literature, Kalliney's extensive archival research shows that evenly balanced superpower competition allowed savvy writers to accept patronage without pledging loyalty to specific political blocs. Likewise, writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police. A revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature, The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century.

The first reference to literary and cultural representations of war in 20th-century English & US literature and film.Covering the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the War on Terror, this Companion reveals the influence of modern wars on the imagination.These newly researched and innovative essays connect ’high’ literary studies to the engagement of film and theatre with warfare, extensively covers the literary and cultural evaluation of the technologies of war and open the literary field to genre fiction.Divided into 5 sections: 20th-Century Wars and Their Literatures; Bodies, Behaviours, Cultures; The Cultural Impact of the Technologies of Modern War; The Spaces of Modern War & Genres of War Culture.Key Features: * All-new original essays commissioned from major critics and cultural historians.* Reflects the way war studies are currently being taught and researched: in the volume’s approach, structure and breadth of coverage.* For scholars: core arguments and detailed research topics.* For students: Historically grounded topic- and genre-based essays, useful forstudying the modern period and war modules.