The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Cold War

How did the ideological conflict between two superpowers during the second half of the twentieth century shape American writing? Chapters will interest students of American Indian, Black, Jewish-American, Latino/a, Asian American, and women's literature, as well as war writing, American theater, postmodernism, and popular fiction.

This Companion explores the relationship between American literature and the Cold War. It shows how American writers offered critical depictions of social conformism amid the Cold War drive for consensus and McCarthyite persecution during the Eisenhower years. From the formal experiments of Beat and Black Mountain writers and the countercultural politics of the New Left to the postmodernism of the Reagan era, literature oscillated between tropes of 'freedom,' aligned with the Western geopolitical imagination, and 'constraint,' associated with supposedly totalitarian communist regimes. Writers also confronted the threats of nuclear annihilation, environmental crisis, and US imperial overreach. Influenced by the Civil Rights movement, marginalized communities developed literary practices that articulated resistance and demands for liberation, often in solidarity with global anti-colonial struggles. Work associated with second-wave feminism, the Black Arts Movement, American Indian and Chicano/a renaissances, and gay and lesbian movements challenged both the ideological certainties and representational conventions of the liberal status quo.