Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture : Children of Empire.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- 1 Introduction: "An Unprecedented Recession from Adult Life" -- 2 "Don't Step on My Blue Suede Shoes": Empire, Deterrence and the Origins of Dissent in Cold War America -- 3 Generational Politics, Fifties Freud and the "Fragmentation of the Oedipus" -- 4 The Parent-Apparent: "De-Parentification" and the Post-Oedipal Family in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof -- 5 Generation on Trial: Arthur Miller's Theater of Judgment -- 6 Trauma, Mourning and Self-(Re)Fashioning in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: Reinventing Youth in Cold War America -- 7 "Racing with the Moon": Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the All-American Girl in William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness -- 8 The End of Adulthood: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita -- 9 Jack Kerouac's On the Road: "Oedipus Eddy" and "the Story of America" -- 10 Death's Child: Lost Fathers, Bereaved Daughters and the Rise of Postwar Feminism-Rereading Sylvia Plath -- 11 The Comforts of Home: Generational Dialectics in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction -- 12 Conclusion: The Cold War, Vietnam, the Sixties and After -- Bibliography -- Index.

This study traces the emergence of a distinctive post-war American family dynamic between parent and adolescent or already adult child. In-depth readings of individual writers such as, Arthur Miller, William Styron, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor and Sylvia Plath, situate their work in relation to the Cold War and suggest how the figuring of adolescents and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of American youth. This book is a superb research tool for any student or academic with an interest in youth culture, cultural studies, American studies, cold war studies, twentieth-century American literature, history of the family, and age studies.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.