| This dissertation studies social protest literature in the 1950s United States and its reception in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. I consider writings by W. E. B. Du Bois, Howard Fast, and Allen Ginsberg whose indictment of American society made them, from a Cold War point of view, suspected internal enemies. I then use these works and criticism surrounding them as a means of exploring the nature of subversion, social change, citizenship, and nationalism in the context of 1950s literature and culture.;My dissertation is an exploration of an historical moment and an attempt to capture the political, cultural, and especially literary dynamics swirling around the United States, the Soviet Union and the writers I have chosen to study. I argue that the Cold War was a time when the overarching conflict between the U.S. and the USSR was replayed in cultural struggles within each nation, so that dissent acquired a treasonous cast and a relationship was implied between those who disagreed with the system in power and one's external enemy. Using historical research, I show how the governments on both sides drew these authors into the political fray. What resulted was a triangular situation where those dissenting, such as the writers I study, were constantly implicated in the wider Cold War conflict and drawn to take a position in relation to it.;Each of these writers took at different stance towards the Cold War. Du Bois acted as a mediator, merging African American concerns with Soviet socialist realist methodology in his fiction trilogy The Black Flame ; Fast retreated into an idealism that eventually alienated him from both sides, a stance foreshadowed by Spartacus; Ginsberg challenged the terms of the debate, making the Cold War a matter of psychology and flipping the conflict from one between the two superpowers to one between generations, as we can see in "Howl." By tracing these dynamics through these texts and their reception, this dissertation brings to light a hitherto lost aspect of Cold War letters, namely, politically engaged literature and the problems that beset it during the time of the "silent generation."... |
