The Cold War involved a set of ethical, moral, and even aesthetic struggles alongside the economic, scientific, political, and military competition between the West and the Soviet Bloc. Individuals, no less than nations, were pressured to choose between self-actualized enactments of freedom or submission to presumed systems of constraint, whether that constraint came in the guise of political totalitarianism, complacent middle-class conformity, or even aesthetic rigidity. For nearly half a century, American narrative literature featured protagonists whose journeys toward knowledge, self-mastery, worldliness, and agency were expressed in a Cold War rhetoric of freedom and choice. We can posit, in opening this volume, that American literature of the era was shaped by affective geopolitics: American experience as recorded in cultural documents was ineluctably rendered in a Cold War discourse that pitted freedom against constraint – that envisioned the aspirational subjectivity of human beings as engaged on almost every front in a contentious battle with the forces of unfreedom. This introduction also briefly surveys the themes of the upcoming chapters of The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Cold War.

This chapter departs from many typical readings of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which treat that novel’s spiritual and numinous presences, practices, and powers as fantastical or magical rather than real and efficacious. Drawing on Díaz’s own statements, I show how the novel insists on the reality of supernatural forces and on how practices of prayer and the intervention of powerful spiritual forces, such as the Mongoose, can lead to resilience and survival amid the uncertainties and traumas of Caribbean dictatorship and migration to America. Díaz’s sense of cosmic vision in the novel, an insistence that there is spiritual purpose and power at work in the cosmos, shows how syncretic religious formations in the Caribbean can empower a radical hope in the face of the seemingly traumatic and impossible.

This chapter identifies in George Saunders’s earlier critiques of neoliberalism in his short stories and his critique of a conservative American version of Christian hell in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a common project with a spiritual alternative in the Buddhist order of compassion. I offer a brief history of the Christian theology of hell and American neoliberalism to show how they share a common idea of a punitive, individualistic sense of natural order, one with a common origin point in the theology of Augustine on the divine will. First tracing the public spiritual commitments expressed by Saunders across a wide range of his interviews, I then show how his sense of the potential of literature to empower a spirituality of compassion informs Lincoln in the Bardo’s rejection of the Christian hell and the novel’s alternative vision of a world where compassion is the order of the universe.

Now twenty-five years into the twenty-first century, the formidable legacies of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) come into clear view. She lent her lyrical voice to celebrating the dignity, complexity, and heroism of ordinary people. Her portraits of the residents of Chicago’s South Side, where she lived most of her life, achieve vitality because of her skillful fusion of Black cultural tradition with modernist aesthetics. She saw her poetry chronicling the history of a transforming society in the service of truth and universal humanism. Brooks wanted her poetry “to vivify the universal fact,” and early in her writing career she found that humanism all around her as she looked from the window of her small second-floor apartment at 623 East 63rd Street. This chapter discusses Brooks as the singular inspiration for the inaugural Furious Flower Conference in 1994, her passion for inspiring young people to explore their gifts of writing and reading, her own distinguished career as an award-winning American poet, and her deep devotion to the craft of writing and the inventiveness of language.

The story of American literature and empire is vast and complex, its boundaries as hard to draw and as continuously disputed as the historical borders of the US nation-state itself. Historians of US empire tend to periodize their field into three broad eras of imperial formation: (1) continental expansion under the aegis of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century; (2) the emergence of overseas empire with the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US first acquired formal territories abroad; and (3) and the rise to globalism after World War II, when US military policing in the interests of global capitalism created an empire of military bases around the world while rebranding US imperialism and neocolonialism as embodiments of democracy and freedom, in part through a series of “endless” wars spanning the Cold War through the post-9/11 War on Terror. But for literary scholars, this broad historical periodization of empire loses coherence in the face of literature’s persistent ability to reimagine history, to make counterfactual claims, to invent new worlds, to change the experience of time, and to speculate and counter-speculate about the grounds of reality.

Allen Ginsberg visited China in 1984, first as part of an American delegation of writers and then as a private traveler. He visited many cities over a period of several months and spent time lecturing on American poetry. He found China oppressive and, in many ways, disappointing, and also he suffered many health problems owing to the pollution there; but nonetheless his time in China was a creatively fertile period for him, resulting in a number of important poems. This chapter details his travels around China, focusing on a sense of paranoia that plagued him because he was in a totalitarian state where he was constantly observed. It also looks at the poems that emerged from his trip, examining the various influences his inquiries into Chinese poetry had on his own work.

This chapter provides an overview of the proliferation of Arthurian texts produced in North America, from an 1807 pamphlet to the poetry, drama, children’s literature and prose fiction of the turn of the century. It situates the legend’s development in Canada and the United States in relation to the Arthurian revival in England, specifically Tennyson’s poetry. In doing so, it identifies some of the common stories adapted (the Grail quest, the love triangles) and the different approaches of Canadian and American authors, whether claiming continuity with, or separation from, the English tradition. The chapter ends with analysis of the American Arthurian novel with the most lasting influence: Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

This chapter shows how literature responded to foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreaks in North American cattle during the twentieth century. While FMD was less lethal than the rinderpest outbreaks in Europe during the previous two centuries, its debilitating effects upon cattle size and milk production led Mexican and US governments to implement stamping out methods of disease containment. As in that earlier epizootic, federal and state governments met fierce resistance to the displacement of the pastoral power of farmers and cattle drovers. This resistance, in turn, was incorporated into the work of Mexican and US authors such as Rafael Bernal, Ramón Rubín, William Burroughs, and Larry McMurtry, whose references to the outbreaks were often framed alongside human biopolitics associated with the Holocaust, the US war on drugs, and the Mexican government’s fraught relationship with its rural and Indigenous communities. By exploring how the image of sickened cattle came to be associated with human victims of state-sponsored violence, the chapter provides new insight into how literary narratives structured North American conceptions of biopolitics during this century.

This chapter investigates the cultural legacy of the “Great Epizootic”: a North American horse influenza that paralyzed transportation networks throughout the continent in 1872. Americans responded to this outbreak by recasting it in humorous ways, writing poems about horses behaving like sickened people and marvelous accounts of human laborers working as surrogate animals. Within these literary documents, the veterinary term “epizootic” began to acquire a different meaning associated with inexplicable breakdowns in human behavior. Through figures including Zora Neale Hurston, Kurt Vonnegut, and Flannery O’Connor; in media forms ranging from musicals like Whoopee! (1930) to more recent rap songs like Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “My Hooptie” (1989); and even, perhaps, in the origin of the word “oops,” these literary revisionings of the Great Epizootic left a rich but underappreciated legacy within the United States. Recovering this legacy can augment efforts within human–animal studies for renewed interspecies intimacies brought about by a recognition of our shared vulnerability to disease.

James’s modernism is based directly on the psychology he founded, and specifically on his recognition that the self is malleable (or “plastic”), aggregate, distributed, and capable of mental reform. Yet James’s outspoken critique of US imperialism and the lynching of African Americans reflected his understanding of the dangerous potential of conversion – namely, that revolutions in belief carry a measure of uncertainty and risk, not just to individual believers but to the very fabric of democratic thought. Jamesean conversion therefore dramatizes the processes by which consent is staged from within and from without. The self enacts the drama in the form of an internal dialogue in which one imagines one’s “self” inhabiting a particular temporo-spatial location, as if fulfilling the role of a protagonist in a work of fiction. Against that background, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware dramatize the processes through which individuals become plastically transformed under the manipulations of powerful “pattern-setters” of public opinion. By fracturing and fragmenting imperial forms of selfhood, these psychological Bildungsromane inaugurate a reform modernism that registers dissent from the imperial sway of groups, demonstrating the strenuous effort required by individuals to transform oppressive systems from within.

The introduction initially approaches the topic of money and American literature via key passages from the work of Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison. It then traces three key threads running through the following chapters. Firstly, it considers the close interrelationship between money and ideas of American nationhood: how the unity of the “United States” has been fostered, and unsettled, through monetary initiatives, schemes, and experiments. Next, it addresses the interplay between materiality and immateriality – “real” and “imaginary” forms of value – that has been a persistent topic of debate in American monetary history, as well as the closely related question of money’s deep affinity with writing as a different but connected form of value-bearing inscription. A pivotal, money-themed chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) serves as a case study. The introduction’s final section foregrounds the fundamental question of money’s relation to power and identity: its constitutive role in structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalization and, in particular, its inextricability – as society’s dominant measure of value – from conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nella Larsen serve to illustrate these ideas.

Literary historians have long envisioned the 1870s as a turning point in the invention of a specifically Victorian literary age only because they have taken American Edmund Clarence Stedman at his word. Treating his Victorian Poets (1875) as an unprecedented critical project responsible for popularizing, even introducing, the very adjective Victorian, such historians have — by extension — interpreted the latter as a primarily literary term always already suggesting inadequacy and obsolescence. Considering the evolution of Stedman’s work over time and for different audiences, and in relation to earlier and later critical efforts including George L. Craik’s Compendious History of English Literature (1861) and Alfred Austin’s The Poetry of the Period (1870), this chapter offers a fuller, more nuanced account of the role of the 1870s in consolidating a Victorian age and a Victorian literature, partly by demonstrating how Stedman’s account worked to assert America’s primacy in a contested transatlantic field.

Americanist literary criticism has long emphasized the “new” as moments of rupture with traditional modes of interpretation. From New Historicism to the New Americanists, this introduction takes stock of some of these developments over the last twenty years, providing at once an overview and ideas about new directions that the field of nineteenth-century Americanist literary criticism might take in the future. In particular, it highlights the importance of critical modes that focus on bodies and sexualities, move away from the nation-state, adjust the scales of analysis, and reconsider aesthetics.

“Hollywood Signs” begins by observing a convergence in the fields of film and media studies and modernist studies that makes possible a novel synthesis that Classical Hollywood, American Modernism exemplifies. At the same time that scholars in cinema studies supplemented the concept of the “studio system” with attention to the industry’s social organization and an embrace of film interpretation, literary scholars undertook an analogous effort, finding in the institutional conditions in which literature is written and read the basis for a hermeneutics. This compatibility serves as the basis for this book’s approach of construing experiments in literary form as responses to conditions within the Hollywood studio system. The introduction concludes by briefly demonstrating the analytical payoff of this new synthesis in a reading of Ralph Barton and Anita Loos’s understudied film Camille; or, the Fate of a Coquette (1926).