During the Cold War, national discourse strove for unity through patriotism and political moderation to face a common enemy. Some authors and intellectuals supported that narrative by casting America’s complicated history with race and poverty as moral rather than merely political problems. Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America examines southern literature and the culture within the United States from the period just before the Cold War through the civil rights movement to show how this literature won a significant place in Cold War culture and shaped the nation through the time of Hillbilly Elegy. Tackling cultural issues in the country through subtext and metaphor, the works of authors like William Faulkner, Lillian Smith, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Walker Percy redefined “South” as much more than a geographical identity within an empire. The “South” has become a racially coded sociopolitical and cultural identity associated with white populist conservatism that breaks geographical boundaries and, as it has in the past, continues to have a disproportionate influence on the nation’s future and values.

During the Cold War, national discourse strove for unity through patriotism and political moderation to face a common enemy. Some authors and intellectuals supported that narrative by casting America’s complicated history with race and poverty as moral rather than merely political problems. Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America examines southern literature and the culture within the United States from the period just before the Cold War through the civil rights movement to show how this literature won a significant place in Cold War culture and shaped the nation through the time of Hillbilly Elegy. Tackling cultural issues in the country through subtext and metaphor, the works of authors like William Faulkner, Lillian Smith, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Walker Percy redefined “South” as much more than a geographical identity within an empire. The “South” has become a racially coded sociopolitical and cultural identity associated with white populist conservatism that breaks geographical boundaries and, as it has in the past, continues to have a disproportionate influence on the nation’s future and values.

Adopting a unique historical approach to its subject and with a particular focus on the institutions involved in the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature, this handbook surveys the way in which the Cold War shaped literature and literary production, and how literature affected the course of the Cold War. To do so, in addition to more 'traditional' sources it uses institutions like MFA programs, university literature departments, book-review sections of newspapers, publishing houses, non-governmental cultural agencies, libraries, and literary magazines as a way to understand works of the period differently. Broad in both their geographical range and the range of writers they cover, the book's essays examine works of mainstream American literary fiction from writers such as Roth, Updike and Faulkner, as well as moving beyond the U.S. and the U.K. to detail how writers and readers from countries including, but not limited to, Taiwan, Japan, Uganda, South Africa, India, Cuba, the USSR, and the Czech Republic engaged with and contributed to Anglo-American literary texts and institutions.

Contributions by Anita DeRouen, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, W. Ralph Eubanks, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Bernard T. Joy, John Wharton Lowe, Anne MacMaster, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Annette Trefzer, Jay Watson, and Ryoichi Yamane Working closely in each other’s orbit in Mississippi, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright created lasting portraits of southern culture, each from a distinctly different vantage point. Taking into consideration their personal, political, and artistic ways of responding to the histories and realities of their time and place, Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence offers comparative scholarship that forges new connections—or, as Welty might say, traces new confluences—across texts, authors, identities, and traditions. In the collection, contributors discuss Faulkner’s Light in August; Sanctuary; Go Down, Moses; As I Lay Dying; “A Rose for Emily”; and “That Evening Sun”; Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings; One Time, One Place; The Optimist’s Daughter; Losing Battles; “Why I Live at the P.O.”; “Livvie”; “Moon Lake”; “The Burning”; “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”; and “The Demonstrators”; and Wright’s Native Son; The Long Dream; 12 Million Black Voices; Black Boy; Lawd Today!; “The Man Who Lived Underground”; “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”; and “Long Black Song.” Acknowledging that Mississippi ground was never level for any of the three writers, the fourteen essays in this volume turn from the familiar strategies of single-author criticism toward a mode of analysis more receptive to the fluid mergings of creative currents, placing Wright, Welty, and Faulkner in comparative relationship to each other as well as to other Mississippi writers such as Margaret Walker, Lewis Nordan, Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward, Steve Yarbrough, and Kiese Laymon. Doing so deepens and enriches our understanding of these literary giants and the Mississippi modernism they made together.

The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.

Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War.

The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South provides a collection of vibrant and multidisciplinary essays by scholars from a wide range of backgrounds working in the field of U.S. southern literary studies. With topics ranging from American studies, African American studies, transatlantic or global studies, multiethnic studies, immigration studies, and gender studies, this volume presents a multi-faceted conversation around a wide variety of subjects in U.S. southern literary studies. The Companion will offer a comprehensive overview of the southern literary studies field, including a chronological history from the U.S. colonial era to the present day and theoretical touchstones, while also introducing new methods of reconceiving region and the U.S. South as inherently interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional. The volume will therefore be an invaluable tool for instructors, scholars, students, and members of the general public who are interested in exploring the field further but will also suggest new methods of engaging with regional studies, American studies, American literary studies, and cultural studies.

The Cold War was not only about the imperial ambitions of the super powers, their military strategies, and antagonistic ideologies. It was also about conflicting worldviews and their correlates in the daily life of the societies involved. The term “Cold War Culture” is often used in a broad sense to describe media influences, social practices, and symbolic representations as they shape, and are shaped by, international relations. Yet, it remains in question whether — or to what extent — the Cold War Culture model can be applied to European societies, both in the East and the West. While every European country had to adapt to the constraints imposed by the Cold War, individual development was affected by specific conditions as detailed in these chapters. This volume offers an important contribution to the international debate on this issue of the Cold War impact on everyday life by providing a better understanding of its history and legacy in Eastern and Western Europe.

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of Southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum Southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth-century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of Southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical Southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

An illuminating and authoritative history of America in the years between the Civil War and World War I, Jackson Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Fascinating.... A major work by a leading historian at the top of his game—at once engaging and tightly argued." —The New York Times Book Review “Dazzling cultural history: smart, provocative, and gripping. It is also a book for our times, historically grounded, hopeful, and filled with humane, just, and peaceful possibilities.” —The Washington Post In the half-century between the Civil War and World War I, widespread yearning for a new beginning permeated American public life. Dreams of spiritual, moral, and physical rebirth formed the foundation for the modern United States, inspiring its leaders with imperial ambition. Theodore Roosevelt's desire to recapture frontier vigor led him to promote U.S. interests throughout Latin America. Woodrow Wilson's vision of a reborn international order drew him into a war to end war. Andrew Carnegie's embrace of philanthropy coincided with his creation of the world's first billion-dollar corporation, United States Steel. Presidents and entrepreneurs helped usher the nation into the modern era, but sometimes the consequences of their actions failed to match the grandeur of their hopes. Award-winning historian Jackson Lears richly chronicles this momentous period when America reunited and began to form the world power of the twentieth century. Lears vividly captures imperialists, Gilded Age mavericks, and vaudeville entertainers, and illuminates the roles played by a variety of seekers, male and female, from populist farmers to avant-garde artists and writers to progressive reformers. Some were motivated by their own visions of Christianity; all were swept up in longings for revitalization. In these years marked by wrenching social conflict and vigorous political debate, a modern America emerged and came to dominance on a world stage. Illuminating and authoritative, Rebirth of a Nation brilliantly weaves the remarkable story of this crucial epoch into a masterful work of history.