Research Catalog

Politics and the novel during the Cold War

Title: Politics and the novel during the Cold War / David Caute.
Author: Caute, David.
Publication: New Brunswick, N.J. : Transaction Publishers, ©2010.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person.	Text	Use in library	JFE 15-3015	Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Description

403 pages; 24 cm

Summary

"David Caute's wide-ranging study examines how outstanding novelists of the Cold War era conveyed the major issues of contemporary politics and history. In the United States and Western Europe the political novel flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, the crisis years of economic depression, fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the consolidation of Stalinism, and the Second World War." "Starting with the high hopes generated by the Spanish Civil War, Caute then explores the "god that failed" pessimism that overtook the Western political novel in the 1940s. The writers under scrutiny include Hemingway, Dos Passos, Orwell, Koestler, Malraux, Serge, Greene, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Strikingly different approaches to the burning issues of the time are found among orthodox Soviet novelists such as Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Kochetov, and Pavlenko. Soviet official culture continued to choke on modernism, formalism, satire, and allegory." "In Russia and Eastern Europe dissident novelists offered contesting voices as they engaged in the fraught re-telling of life under Stalinism. Studies of Pasternak, Grossman, Chukovskaya, Wolf, Johnson, Kundera, and Vladimov lead on to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, viewed as a uniquely gifted critic of the Soviet system. A sequence of thematic commentaries compare Western and Soviet fictional responses to the Moscow trials, terror, forced labor, and the nature of totalitarianism. The figures of Stalin and Lenin are shown to have fascinated novelists." "The emergence of the New Left in the 1960s generated a new wave of fiction challenging America's global stance. Mailer, Doctorow, and Coover brought fresh literary sensibilities to bear on such iconic events as the 1967 siege of the Pentagon and the execution of the Rosenbergs."--Jacket.

Subjects

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 381-388) and indexes.

Contents

Introduction -- Commentary : the Spanish labyrinth -- Malraux : Days of hope -- Hemingway : For whom the bell tolls -- Dos Passos : betrayal -- Orwell : Homage to Catalonia -- Koestler : sentence of death -- Commentary : the Soviet trials -- Beyond Darkness at noon -- Serge : The case of comrade Tulayev -- Orwell : from big pig to big brother -- Commentary : totalitarianism, ideology, power -- Sartre : history, fiction and the party -- Commentary : Soviet forced labour camps -- Koestler and the little flirts -- Commentary : fellow-travellers -- Greene : The quiet American -- Commentary : the socialist realist novel from war to cold war -- The tragic case of Vasily Grossman -- Commentary : collectivization -- Pasternak : Doctor Zhivago -- Chukovskaya : honour among women -- Commentary : purge and terror -- The iron fist : the trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky -- Foreign affairs : the menace of Kafka -- Germany doubly divided : Christa Wolf and Uwe Johnson -- One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich -- The first circle -- Commentary : Stalin and Lenin in Soviet fiction -- From Cancer ward to The gulag archipelago -- Commentary : bureaucracy, the new class and double standards -- Vladimov : Faithful Ruslan -- Commentary : fiction, the new journalism, and the postmodern -- Mailer : The armies of the night -- Fiction and the Rosenbergs : E.L. Doctorow and Robert Coover -- Conclusion.

Call Number

JFE 15-3015

ISBN

9781412811613 (alk. paper)
1412811619 (alk. paper)

LCCN

2009044440

OCLC

351324708

Author

Caute, David.

Title

Politics and the novel during the Cold War / David Caute.

Imprint

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 381-388) and indexes.

Chronological Term

1900 - 1999

Research Call Number

JFE 15-3015

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