Politics and the Novel During the Cold War / Edition 1

by David Caute

Overview

David Cautes 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. The emergence of the New Left in the 1960s generated a new wave of fiction challenging Americas global stance. Mailer, Doctorow, and Coover brought fresh literary sensibilities tobear on such iconic events as the 1967 siege of the Pentagon and the execution of the Rosenbergs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412811613
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	01/30/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	412
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

David Caute is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Henry Fellow at Harvard. A visiting professor at Columbia, NYU and University of California, Irvine, his most recent work is The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1: The Spanish Civil War

1. Commentary: The Spanish Labyrinth
2. Malraux: Days of Hope
3. Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
4. Dos Passos: Betrayal
5. Orwell: Homage to Catalonia
6. Koestler: Sentence of Death

Part 2: The God That Failed

7. Commentary: The Soviet Trials
8. Beyond Darkness at Noon
9. Serge: The Case of Comrade Tulayev
10. Orwell: From Big Pig to Big Brother
11. Commentary: Totalitarianism, Ideology, Power
12. Sartre: History, Fiction and the Party
13. Commentary: Soviet Forced Labour Camps
14. Koestler: and the Little Flirts
15. Commentary: Fellow-Travellers
16. Greene: The Quiet American

Part 3: History and Fiction in the Soviet Orbit

17. Commentary: The Socialist Realist Novel from War to Cold War
18. The Tragic Case of Vasily Grossman
19. Commentary: Collectivization
20. Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
21. Chukovskaya: Honour among Women
22. Commentary: Purge and Terror
23. The Iron Fist: The Trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky
24. Foreign Affairs: The Menace of Kafka
25. Germany Doubly Divided: Christa Wolf and Uwe Johnson

Part 4: Solzhenitsyn

26. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
27. The First Circle
28. Commentary: Stalin and Lenin in Soviet Fiction
29. From Cancer Ward to The Gulag Archipelago
30. Commentary: Bureaucracy, the New Class and Double Standards
31. Vladimov: Faithful Ruslan

Part 5: The American Novel and the New Politics

32. Commentary: Fiction, the New Journalism, and the Postmodern
33. Mailer: The Armies of the Night
34. Fiction and the Rosenbergs: E.L. Doctorow and Robert Coover

Conclusion

References and Notes

Bibliography

Name Index

Subject Index

Editorial Reviews

Agreeing with Irving Howe's contention that the political novel flourishes in times of civil turmoil, the prolific Caute sweeps through the work of 30-plus authors who reflected the Cold War experience from the Spanish Civil War to the late 1970s… The book's strength is its reach beyond Western European writing (Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Uwe Johnson, and others) to Soviet writing (in addition to Solzhenitsyn, Victor Serge, Vasily Grossman, Boris Pasternak, Lydia Chukovskaya, et al.), thus exposing Anglo-American readers to Soviet writing… Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.” —B. Diemert, Choice "As the memory of the horrors of Stalinism fades with the disappearance of those that lived through it, it will be the novels that were generated by the Cold War that will shape historical understanding. David Caute's new book will fascinate and inform readers, providing them with the context and insights they need to make sense of this important genre of literature." —Harvey Klehr “Caute’s new book is the most authoritative study to date of politics and literature during the Cold War and one of the wisest and witties books of cultural criticism to appear for many years.” —John Gray, Literary Review “[A]n exhaustive analysis of Cold War fiction is created, read, and criticized in the context of the last century’s most rhetorical of conflicts.” —Olga Voronina, The Russian Review

From the Publisher

"[A]n exhaustive analysis of Cold War fiction is created, read, and criticized in the context of the last century's most rhetorical of conflicts." --(Olga Voronina)

The Russian Review