American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States emerged as the dominant imperial power, and in US popular memory, the Second World War is remembered more vividly than the American Revolution. American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 provides crucial contexts for interpreting the literature of this period. Essays from scholars in literature, history, art history, ethnic studies, and American studies show how writers intervened in the global struggles of the decade: the Second World War, the Cold War, and emerging movements over racial justice, gender and sexuality, labor, and de-colonization. One recurrent motif is the centrality of the political impulse in art and culture. Artists and writers participated widely in left and liberal social movements that fundamentally transformed the terms of social life in the twentieth century, not by advocating specific legislation, but by changing underlying cultural values. This book addresses all the political impulses fueling art and literature at the time, as well as the development of new forms and media, from modernism and noir to radio and the paperback.

Part I. The United States in the World: 1. Why We Fight: contending narratives of the Second World War Christopher Vials; 2. Human rights in American political discourse Glenn Mitoma; 3. Fictions of anti-semitism and the beginning of Holocaust literature Josh Lambert; 4. The fatal machine: the postwar imperial state and the radical novel Benjamin Balthaser; 5. Antifascism as a political grammar and cultural force Christopher Vials; 6. From confession to exposure: transitions in anticommunist literature Alex Goodall; 7. The contested origins of the Atomic Age and the Cold War Christian Appy; Part II. Emergent Publics: 8. Cross currents: WWII and the increasing visibility of race Bill Mullen; 9. Good Asian/bad Asian: Asian American racial formation Floyd Cheung; 10. Social realism, the Ghetto, and African American literature James Smethurst; 11. From factory to home? The crisis in the gendered division of labor Julia L. Mickenberg; 12. Public excursions in fierce truth-telling: literary cultures and homosexuality Aaron Lecklider; 13. Resurgence: conservatives organize against the new deal Kathy Olmsted; Part III. Media and Genre: 14. Late modernisms, latent realisms: the politics of literary interpretation Sarah Ehlers; 15. The city in the literary imagination Sean McCann; 16. Noir and the ebb of radical hope Alan Wald; 17. Narrating the war Philip Beidler; 18. Paperbacks and the literary marketplace Erin Smith; 19. Literary radicals in Radio's public sphere Judith Smith; 20. The state cultural apparatus: federal funding of arts and letters Joan Saab.

Christopher Vials is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where he also serves as Director of American Studies. He is the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (2014), for which he was recently interviewed on NPR and CBC Radio. He is also author of Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture 1935–1947 (2009), and his work has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Criticism, Science and Society, and other venues.