The Cold War was the longest conflict in a century defined by the scale and brutality of its conflicts. In the battle between the democratic West and the communist East there was barely a year in which the West was not organising, fighting or financing some foreign war. It was an engagement that resulted – in Korea, Guatemala, Nicaragua and elsewhere – in some twenty million dead. This collection of essays analyses the literary response to the coups, insurgencies and invasions that took place around the globe, and explores the various thematic and stylistic trends that Cold War hostilities engendered in world writing. Drawing together scholars of various cultural backgrounds, the volume focuses upon such themes as representation, nationalism, political resistance, globalisation and ideological scepticism. Eschewing the typical focus in Cold War scholarship on Western authors and genres, there is an emphasis on the literary voices that emerged from what are often considered the ‘peripheral’ regions of Cold War geo-politics. Ranging in focus from American postmodernism to Vietnamese poetry, from Cuban autobiography to Maoist theatre, and from African fiction to Soviet propaganda, this book will be of real interest to all those working in twentieth-century literary studies, cultural studies, history and politics.
Author(s): Andrew Hammond
Edition: 1
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 288
Book Cover......Page 1
Half-Title......Page 2
Series-Title......Page 3
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Notes on contributors......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 12
From rhetoric to rollback: Introductory thoughts on Cold War writing......Page 14
1. The Yellow Peril in the Cold War: Fu Manchu and the Manchurian Candidate......Page 28
2. The Cold War representation of the West in Russian literature......Page 44
3. ‘Is it chaos? Or is it a building site?': British theatrical responses to the Cold War and its aftermath......Page 59
4. Beyond the apocalypse of closure: Nuclear anxiety in postmodern literature of the United States......Page 76
5. The Reds and the Blacks: The historical novel in the Soviet Union and postcolonial Africa......Page 91
6. Marxist literary resistance to the Cold War......Page 113
7. Poetry, politics and war: Representations of the American war in Vietnamese poetry......Page 127
8. Remembering war and revolution on the Maoist stage......Page 144
9. Revolution and rejuvenation: Imaging communist Cuba......Page 159
10. An anxious triangulation: Cold War, nationalism and regional resistance in East-Central European literatures......Page 173
11. ‘Lifting each other off our knees’: South African women's poetry of resistance, 1980–1989......Page 189
12. Outwitting the politburo: Politics and poetry behind the Iron Curtain......Page 208
13. The anti-American: Graham Greene and the Cold War in the 1950s......Page 225
14. The excluded middle: Intellectuals and the 'Cold War' in Latin America......Page 239
Bibliography......Page 255
Index......Page 279
