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Challenges the widespread misconception that the American 1950s was a placid decade with a literature to match.
List of contents
Introduction Steven Belletto; Part I. Cultural Issues: 1. Cold War Arthur Redding; 2. Mass media Katie Muth; 3. When psychoanalysis was in vogue Mary Esteve; 4. Towards decolonization Cathy J. Schlund-Vials; 5. Religion Jason Stevens; 6. Politics Tracy Floreani; Part II. Varieties of Literary Experience: 7. WASP culture Keith Wilhite; 8. African American literature Steven Belletto; 9. Los(t) 'happy days': Chicana/o literature, 1950-1960 Spencer R. Herrera; 10. Asian American literature Tara Fickle; 11. Gay and lesbian culture in the 1950s Michael Trask; 12. Feminist literature Kathlene McDonald; 13. Youth culture and the postwar drop-out narrative Denis Jonnes; Part III. Schools, Movements, and Sensibilities: 14. Proto-postmodernism Robert Genter; 15. Black mountain college as experimental arts community Anne Dewey; 16. The beat movement Fiona Paton; 17. Advertisements for themselves: poetry, confession, and the arts of publicity Christopher Grobe; 18. New York School Ben Hickman; 19. Literary exiles, cultural émigrés Martin Halliwell; 20. The literature of commitment Alan Wald; Part IV. Formats and Genres: 21. From consensus to conflict: little magazines in the 1950s Loren Glass; 22. Best sellers and the 1950s Evan Brier; 23. A genre comes of age: the maturation of science fiction in the 1950s Rob Latham.
About the author
Steven Belletto is Associate Professor of English at Lafayette College. He is author of No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (Cambridge, 2017), and co-editor of American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment (2012). The author of numerous articles on post-1945 American literature and culture that have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Quarterly, ELH, and Twentieth-Century Literature, from 2011–2016 he was associate editor for the journal Contemporary Literature, and is now an editor there. He is currently writing a literary history of the Beats to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Summary
American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 explores the under-recognized complexity and variety of 1950s literature by focalizing discussions through a series of keywords and formats that encourage readers to draw fresh connections among literary form and the theories, institutions, cultures, and social phenomena.
