Likewise, the authors describe phenomena—such as the FBI’s surveillance of writers (especially African Americans), biopolitics, development theory, struggles over the centralization and decentralization of government, and the cultural work of Reaganism—that open up new contexts for discussing postwar culture. Extending the timeline and expanding the geographic scope of Cold War culture, this book reveals both the literature and the culture of the time to be more dynamic and complex than has been generally supposed.
An assistant professor of English and chair of the American Studies program at Lafayette College, Steven Belletto is the author of No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (Oxford, 2012) and has published essays on postwar literature and culture in such journals as ELH, American Quarterly, Clio, Criticism, and Genre. He is an associate editor of the journal Contemporary Literature. Daniel Grausam is the author of On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (Virginia, 2011) and is currently completing Half Lives: The Legacies of the First Nuclear Age, an interdisciplinary study of post–Cold War American nuclear culture.