Cold War Literature Writing the Global Conflict [Paperback]

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.

1. The Yellow Peril in the Cold War: Fu Manchu and the Manchurian Candidate  2. The Cold War Representation of the West in Russian Literature  3. Is It Chaos? Or Is It a Building Site? : British Theatrical Responses to the Cold War and Its Aftermath  4. Beyond the Apocalypse of Closure: Nuclear Anxiety in Postmodern Literature of the United States  5. The Reds and the Blacks: The Historical Novel in the Soviet Union and Postcolonial Africa  6. Marxist Literary Resistance to the Cold War  7. Poetry, Politics and War: Representations of the American War in Vietnameslós