Product Description: Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, including previously unseen FBI and CIA documents, Archives of Authority argues that cultural politics--specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts--played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the United States during a critical period after World War II...read more

Product Description: The field of Cold War studies has recently undergone a cultural turn. Scholars from many disciplines outside - but increasingly also from within - diplomatic history have come to understand that, just as the Cold War was marked by a political and military competition, it was also characterised by a cultural one...read more

Mark Johnson, a young executive in the great Tyson financial empire, is charged with an unusual and dangerous assignment--to bring peace to one planet and discord to another, to save both civilizations from destruction

Product Description: In Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism, Tobin Siebers claims that modern criticism is a Cold War criticism. Postwar literary theory has absorbed the skepticism, suspicion, and paranoia of the Cold War mentality, and it plays them out in debates about the divided self, linguistic indeterminacy, the metaphysics of presence, multiculturalism, canon formation, power, cultural literacy, and the politics of literature...read more

Product Description: Mainstream American poetry of the 1950s has long been dismissed as deliberately indifferent to its cultural circumstances. In this penetrating study, Edward Brunner breaks the placid surface of the hollow decade to reveal a poetry sharply responsive to issues of its time...read more

Product Description: In discussions of American poetry since World War II, the work of John Berryman has become increasingly neglected and marginalized. Critics have overwhelmingly chosen to favour the notion that he is an academic, ‘establishment’ poet whose career can comfortably be described as a move from New Critical traditionalism towards self-absorbed confessionalism...read more

(view table of contents)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: A collection of new essays in English by both British and German scholars which compare and contrast East and West German literature, culture and the literary scene. A central concern is whether East and West German literature constitute one coherent or two separate literatures.

Product Description: Guys Like Us considers how writers of the 1950s and '60s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort. Michael Davidson examines a wide range of postwar literature, from the fiction of Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

No Accident, Comrade argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers--politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others--contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. They claimed that the USSR perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction amplified by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the popular American refrain used to refer to Marxism: "It was no accident, Comrade").By reading an expansive range of American novels published between 1947-2005, alongside nonfiction texts by the likes of Jerzy Kosinski, Daniel Bell, Ian Hacking, and mid-century game theorists, No Accident, Comrade explains how associations of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War America. Chance became tied to the liberties of U.S. democracy, whereas its eradication or denial became symptomatic of Soviet tyranny. With works by Nabokov, Ellison, Pynchon, Didion, DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, and many others, Steven Belletto shows how writers developed innovative strategies for dealing with and incorporating these ever-present beliefs about chance and its role in their culture. These newly developed narrative techniques allowed them to theorize, satirize, and make sense of the constantly changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict.

Product Description: Many feel that individualism, and the security it demands, define democracy and freedom. This belief is characteristic of the attitude that thinkers from John Dewey to Michel Foucault have criticized as "liberalist." In actuality, we share intimate associations with one another through contacts established by our bodies and even by language...read more

Mark Johnson, a young executive in the great Tyson financial empire, is charged with an unusual and dangerous assignment--to bring peace to one planet and discord to another, to save both civilizations from destruction

Product Description: The Cold War was unique in the way films, books, television shows, colleges and universities, and practices of everyday life were enlisted to create American political consensus. This coercion fostered a seemingly hegemonic, nationally unified perspective devoted to spreading a capitalist, socially conservative notion of freedom throughout the world to fight Communism...read more