A series of handbooks provides strategies for studying and writing about frequently taught literary topics, with each volume offering study guides, background information, suggestions for areas of research, and a list of secondary sources.

This Concise Companion is a guide to the creative output of the United States in the postwar period, in its diverse energies, shapes and forms. Embraces diversity, covering Vietnam literature, gay and lesbian literature, American Jewish fiction, Italian American literature, Irish American writing, emergent ethnic literatures, African American writing, jazz, film, drama and more. Shows how different genres and approaches opened up creative possibilities and interacted in the postwar period. Portrays the postwar United States split by differences of wealth and position, by ethnicity and race, and by agendas of left and right, but united in the intensity of its creative drive.

Within the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.

This title sets out the political developments of the period before looking at developments in drama and the British theatre, poetry and novel writing, popular culture and the American influence in all aspects of literature and the media.

Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity.

From Angus Wilson to Pat Barker and Salman Rushdie, British Culture of the Post-War is an ideal starting point for those studying cultural developments in Britain of recent years. Chapters on individual people and art forms give a clear and concise overview of the progression of different genres. They also discuss the wider issues of Britain's relationship with America and Europe, and the idea of Britishness. Each section is introduced with a short discussion of the major historical events of the period. Read as a whole, British Culture of the Postwar will give students a comprehensive introduction to this turbulent and exciting period, and a greater understanding of the cultural production arising from it.

This book brings together a variety of perspectives to explore the role of literature in the aftermath of political conflict, studying the ways in which writers approach violent conflict and the equally important subject of peace. Essays put insights from Peace and Conflict Studies into dialog with the unique ways in which literature attempts to understand the past, and to reimagine both the present and the future, exploring concepts like truth and reconciliation, post-traumatic memory, historical reckoning, therapeutic storytelling, transitional justice, archival memory, and questions about victimhood and reparation. Drawing on a range of literary texts and addressing a variety of post-conflict societies, this volume charts and explores the ways in which literature attempts to depict and make sense of this new philosophical terrain. As such, it aims to offer a self-conscious examination of literature, and the discipline of literary studies, considering the ability of both to interrogate and explore the legacies of political and civil conflict around the world. The book focuses on the experience of post-Apartheid South Africa, post-Troubles Northern Ireland, and post-dictatorship Latin America. The recent history of these regions, and in particular their acute experience of ethno-religious and civil conflict, make them highly productive contexts in which to begin examining the role of literature in the aftermath of social trauma. Rather than a definitive account of the subject, the collection defines a new field for literary studies, and opens it up to scholars working in other regional and national contexts. To this end, the book includes essays on post-1989 Germany, post-9/11 United States, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sierra Leone, and narratives of asylum seeker/refugee communities. This volume’s comparative frame draws on well-established precedents for thinking about the cultural politics of these regions, making it a valuable resource for scholars of Comparative Literature, Peace and Conflicts Studies, Human Rights, Transitional Justice, and the Politics of Literature.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

In the wake of the disaster of 1945—as Japan was forced to remake itself from “empire” to “nation” in the face of an uncertain global situation—literature and literary criticism emerged as highly contested sites. Today, this remarkable period holds rich potential for opening new dialogue between scholars in Japan and North America as we rethink the historical and contemporary significance of such ongoing questions as the meaning of the American occupation both inside and outside of Japan, the shifting semiotics of “literature” and “politics,” and the origins of what would become crucial ideological weapons of the cultural Cold War. The volume consists of three interrelated sections: “Foregrounding the Cold War,” “Structures of Concealment: ‘Cultural Anxieties,’” and “Continuity and Discontinuity: Subjective Rupture and Dislocation.” One way or another, the essays address the process through which new “Japan” was created in the postwar present, which signified an attempt to criticize and reevaluate the past. Examining postwar discourse from various angles, the essays highlight the manner in which anxieties of the future were projected onto the construction of the past, which manifest in varying disavowals and structures of concealment.

Authors and artists discussed include: Joseph Conrad, Edwin Denby, Joan Didion, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Berbert, Richard Kim, Norman Mailer, Malcolm X, Alan Nadel, and John Updike,