Book contents
- Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture
- Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction The United States of Apocalypse
- Part I America as Apocalypse
- Part II American Apocalypse in (and out of) History
- Chapter 5 The Puritans Prepare for the Second Coming
- Chapter 6 The American Revolution as Extinction and Rebirth
- Chapter 7 Race, American Enlightenment, and the End Times
- Chapter 8 Sentimental Premonitions and Antebellum Spectacle
- Chapter 9 Antebellum Anticipations of Annihilation
- Chapter 10 The Apocalyptic Fury of the Civil War
- Chapter 11 Apocalyptic Form in the American Fin de Siècle
- Chapter 12 The Ruins of American Modernism
- Chapter 13 Mutually Assured Destruction in Cold War/Postwar America
- Chapter 14 Postmodern American Literature at the End of History
- Chapter 15 Ecology, Ethics, and the Apocalyptic Lyric in Recent American Poetry
- Chapter 16 Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Fiction
- Part III Varieties of Apocalyptic Experience
- Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 13 - Mutually Assured Destruction in Cold War/Postwar America
from Part II - American Apocalypse in (and out of) History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2020
- Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture
- Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction The United States of Apocalypse
- Part I America as Apocalypse
- Part II American Apocalypse in (and out of) History
- Chapter 5 The Puritans Prepare for the Second Coming
- Chapter 6 The American Revolution as Extinction and Rebirth
- Chapter 7 Race, American Enlightenment, and the End Times
- Chapter 8 Sentimental Premonitions and Antebellum Spectacle
- Chapter 9 Antebellum Anticipations of Annihilation
- Chapter 10 The Apocalyptic Fury of the Civil War
- Chapter 11 Apocalyptic Form in the American Fin de Siècle
- Chapter 12 The Ruins of American Modernism
- Chapter 13 Mutually Assured Destruction in Cold War/Postwar America
- Chapter 14 Postmodern American Literature at the End of History
- Chapter 15 Ecology, Ethics, and the Apocalyptic Lyric in Recent American Poetry
- Chapter 16 Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Fiction
- Part III Varieties of Apocalyptic Experience
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
In After the End, John Berger notes that “since the Second World War, a variety of ‘unspeakables’ have seldom been silent, although their utterances have often been disguised or symptomatic.” Berger refers to the traumatizing catastrophes of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, while Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden adds “the cold war…, the draft, and Vietnam” to the list of crises that signaled end times. This chapter discusses destruction and regeneration as envisioned in literary and popular writing across the political spectrum in the post-World War II decades: during the era of Cold War consensus, Nobel Laureate William Faulkner enjoyed his literary brethren to “forget” the bomb, and leading white male authors indeed wrote narratives of “personal apocalypse” that bracketed world concerns. African American canonical writers of the period were rarely so sanguine; their anti-apocalyptic writings directly targeted the nuclear threat as intensifying racial oppression at home and/or as urgently pointing white America toward national and international brotherhood.By the late 1960s, as fears of the bomb subsided, establishment writers wrote in the apocalyptic shadow of Charles Manson and the generation of frustrated, radicalized youth thought to follow in his wake.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture , pp. 175 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020