Politics and the Novel During the Cold War

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.

ISBN 1412811619   Pages 374 ISBN13 9781412811613 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Transaction Publishers   Weight (grammes) 703 Imprint Transaction Publishers   Published in Somerset, NJ Format Hardback   Height (mm) 234 Publication date 15 Feb 2010   Width (mm) 160 DEWEY 809.3935809045   Spine width (mm) 28 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level General, Tertiary education

		Introduction		1
Pt. 1		The Spanish Civil War
1		Commentary: The Spanish Labyrinth		9
2		Malraux: Days of Hope		13
3		Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls		23
4		Dos Passes: Betrayal		33
5		Orwell: Homage to Catalonia		39
6		Koestler: Sentence of Death		49
Pt. 2		The God That Failed
7		Commentary: The Soviet Trials		57
8		Beyond Darkness at Noon		61
9		Serge: The Case of Comrade Tulayev		71
10		Orwell: From Big Pig to Big Brother		79
11		Commentary: Totalitarianism, Ideology, Power		95
12		Sartre: History, Fiction and the Party		103
13		Commentary: Soviet Forced Labour Camps		117
14		Koestler: and the Little Flirts		123
15		Commentary: Fellow-Travellers		131
16		Greene: The Quiet American		135
Pt. 3		History and Fiction in the Soviet Orbit
17		Commentary: The Socialist Realist Novel from War to Cold War		147
18		The Tragic Case of Vasily Grossman		171
19		Commentary: Collectivization		177
20		Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago		185
21		Chukovskaya: Honour among Women		197
22		Commentary: Purge and Terror		211
		More...

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