The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures

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.

Greg Barnhisel is Professor of English at Duquesne University, USA. He is an internationally known scholar of the history of the book, modernism and the cultural Cold War, with two monographs on those topics. In 2010, he edited an anthology entitled Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War. He is one of the editors of the journal Book History and a series editor for the ’Studies in Print Culture and the History or the Book’ series at the University of Massachusetts Press.