Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict
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Cold War Literature The Cold War was the longest conflict in a century defined by the scale and brutality of its conflicts. In the battle between the democratic West and the communist East there was barely a year in which the West was not organis- ing, fighting or financing some foreign war. It was an engagement that resulted – in Korea, Guatemala, Nicaragua and elsewhere – in some twenty million dead. This collection of essays analyses the literary response to the coups, insurgencies and invasions that took place around the globe, and explores the various thematic and stylistic trends that Cold War hostilities engendered in world writing. Drawing together scholars of various cultural backgrounds, the volume focuses upon such themes as representation, nationalism, political resistance, globalisation and ideological scepticism. Eschewing the typical focus in Cold War scholarship on Western authors and genres, there is an emphasis on the literary voices that emerged from what are often considered the ‘peripheral’ regions of Cold War geo-politics. Ranging in focus from Amer- ican postmodernism to Vietnamese poetry, from Cuban autobiography to Maoist theatre, and from African fiction to Soviet propaganda, this book will be of real interest to all those working in twentieth-century literary studies, cultural studies, history and politics. Andrew Hammond is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the Swansea Institute, University of Wales. Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature 1 Testimony from the Nazi Camps French women’s voices Margaret-Anne Hutton 2 Modern Confessional Writing New critical essays Edited by Jo Gill 3 Cold War Literature Writing the global conflict Edited by Andrew Hammond Cold War Literature Writing the global conflict Edited by Andrew Hammond First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 Andrew Hammond editorial matter and selection; the contributors their contributions This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-34948-6 (Print Edition) Contents Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgements xi From rhetoric to rollback: introductory thoughts on Cold War writing 1 ANDREW HAMMOND 1 The Yellow Peril in the Cold War: Fu Manchu and the Manchurian Candidate 15 DAVID SEED 2 The Cold War representation of the West in Russian literature 31 ANDREI ROGACHEVSKII 3 ‘Is it chaos? Or is it a building site?’: British theatrical responses to the Cold War and its aftermath 46 CHRIS MEGSON 4 Beyond the apocalypse of closure: nuclear anxiety in postmodern literature of the United States 63 DANIEL CORDLE 5 The Reds and the Blacks: the historical novel in the Soviet Union and postcolonial Africa 78 M. KEITH BOOKER AND DUBRAVKA JURAGA 6 Marxist literary resistance to the Cold War 100 ALAN WALD 7 Poetry, politics and war: representations of the American war in Vietnamese poetry 114 DANA HEALY vi Contents 8 Remembering war and revolution on the Maoist stage 131 XIAOMEI CHEN 9 Revolution and rejuvenation: imagining communist Cuba 146 HAZEL A. PIERRE 10 An anxious triangulation: Cold War, nationalism and regional resistance in East-Central European literatures 160 MARCEL CORNIS-POPE 11 ‘Lifting each other off our knees’: South African women’s poetry of resistance, 1980–1989 176 MARY K. DESHAZER 12 Outwitting the politburo: politics and poetry behind the Iron Curtain 195 PIOTR KUHIWCZAK 13 The anti-American: Graham Greene and the Cold War in the 1950s 212 BRIAN DIEMERT 14 The excluded middle: intellectuals and the ‘Cold War’ in Latin America 226 JEAN FRANCO Bibliography 242 Index 266 Contributors M. Keith Booker is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA. He has published numerous articles and more than two dozen books on modern literature, culture and literary theory. These include The African Novel in English (1998), Monsters, Mushroom Clouds and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964 (2001) and The Post-Utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s (2002). Xiaomei Chen is Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California at Davis, USA. Her major publications include Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter- Discourse in Post-Mao China (1995; revised edition, 2002), Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Culture in Contemporary China (2002) and Reading the Right Text: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (edited, 2003). She has also published numerous articles on comparative literature, critical theory and modern Chinese literature, drama, theatre, women and culture. Daniel Cordle is a Lecturer in English and American Literature at the Not- tingham Trent University. He is the author of Postmodern Postures: Liter- ature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate (1999), and has written on subjects ranging from Milan Kundera’s fiction to I.A. Richards’s literary criticism. The main foci of his work are contemporary American fiction and the relation between literature and science. He is currently writing a book about the representation of nuclear anxiety in American Cold War fiction. Marcel Cornis-Pope is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. His publications include Anatomy of the White Whale: A Poetics of the American Symbolic Romance (1982), Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewrit- ing: Narrative Interpretation in the Wake of Poststructuralism (1992) and Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After viii Contributors (2001). His current project is a multi-volume work (co-edited with John Neubauer) entitled History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Century (2004 onwards). His awards include the CELJ Award for Significant Editorial Achievement for his work as editor of The Comparatist. Mary K. DeShazer is Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, USA. She is the author of Fractured Borders: Theorizing Women’s Cancer Literature (in progress), A Poetics of Resistance: Women’s Writing in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States (1994), and Inspiring Women: Re-Imagining the Muse (1987), and she edited The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature (2001). Her current research focuses on women’s poetry in post-apartheid South Africa. Brian Diemert is an Associate Professor of English at Brescia University College, which is affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s (1996) and of several articles on works by authors such as Greene, Philip Kerr, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and E.L. Doctorow. A specialist in twenti- eth-century British and American fiction, Diemert is currently working on a book on detective fiction and occultism. Jean Franco is Professor Emerita, teaching most recently at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA. She has been decorated by the governments of Chile and Venezuela for her work on Latin American literature, and has received a lifetime achieve- ment award from PEN and the Kalman Silvert award from the Latin American Studies Association. She served as President of the Latin Amer- ican Studies Society of Great Britain and of the Latin American Studies Association in the United States. Her many publications include An Introduction to Latin American Literature (1969), Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (1989) and The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (2002). Andrew Hammond is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the Swansea Institute, University of Wales. In both research and teach- ing, he has pursued interests in modernism, nationalism, identity and exile, with a particular focus on cross-cultural representation and power within Europe. He has published a number of articles on travel writing, the Balkans and postwar fiction, and has edited The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945–2003 (2004). Dana Healy is a Lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her expertise lies in Vietnamese language and literature, particularly in folk narrative and in modern poetry, fiction and theatre. Her publications include Teach Yourself Vietnamese (1997) and art- icles on the writings of Pham Thi Hoai and on Vietnamese literary trans- Contributors ix itions. She has also contributed to the Bibliographic Study Guide to the Lan- guages and Literature of South East Asia (1996). Dubravka Juraga is currently a research assistant at the Center for Techno- logy in Government, Albany, New York, USA. She has published several articles and co-authored two books on Eastern European and postcolonial literatures. She has also co-edited (with M. Keith Booker) Socialist Cul- tures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment (2002) and Rereading Global Socialist Cultures after the Cold War: The Reassessment of a Tradition (2002). Piotr Kuhiwczak is the Director of the Centre for Translation and Com- parative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick.