American Fiction in the Cold War

by Thomas Hill Schaub

In American Fiction in the Cold War Thomas Hill Schaub makes it clear that Trilling’s summary was in itself a mythic reconstruction, a prominent example of the way liberal writers in the late 1940s and 1950s came to terms with their political past.  Schaub’s book brilliantly analyzes their efforts to reshape an “old” liberalism alleged to hold naively optimistic views of human nature, scientific reason, and social progress into a “new,” skeptical liberalism that recognized the persistence of human evil, the fragility of reason, and the ambiguity of moral decision.
    Most important, as American Fiction in the Cold War demonstrates, these liberal reassessments of history, politics, human nature, and destiny—what Schaub calls the “liberal narrative”—mediated the critical and imaginative production of the literary community after World War II.  Schaub shows that the elements of this narrative are visible in a wide spectrum of cultural narratives in American history, political philosophy, and social criticism during the Cold War era.  His analysis of the dominant critical communities of the late 1940s—led by critics such as Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate—recovers the political meanings  embedded within their debates over the nature of literary realism, the definition of the novel, and speculations on its “death.”
    In the second part of his study, Schaub turns to Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer, and John Barth.  His readings of their fiction isolate the political and cultural content of works often faulted for their apparent efforts to transcend social history.  Reviewing John Barth’s End of the Road , for example, he shows the politics of culture concealed within what seems to be a philosophical narrative.  In novel after novel, he demonstrates, the liberal narrative is operating from within, tuning and steering the direction of the plot and the creation of the character.  Schaub’s penetrating exploration of the relationship between U.S. political and social thought and the literary consciousness in the early postwar years will be of interest to intellectual historians and to students of American literary culture.

236 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1991

Reviews

[Nathanael Booth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the sort of book I would call “workmanlike”—not brilliant, not soul-shattering, but very solid in what it does. Shaub seeks to demonstrate that post-WWII American Fiction as a whole (his examples include such seemingly opposed figures as Norman Mailer and Flannery O’Connor) partook of the general malaise that beset liberalism in the 1950s. During that time, Leftists—disillusioned by the totalitarianism of Soviet Russia—retreated from political engagement and sought a “new liberalism,” one that would admit of the contradictions they saw in the human heart (thus, as Shaub points out, the new liberalism was psychological rather than political, and thus was an essentially conservative impulse). Shaub concludes by suggesting that postmodernism in literature was a continuation of this historical trend. This book is not gripping, but it is solid and well-argued.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schaub analyzes the postwar American novel in terms of political and cultural thought in the late 1940s and 1950s. He argues that during the Cold War, leftist thinkers (the New York intellectuals) moved closer to the right (and to the position of the New Critics), and that these political and cultural shifts are reflected in the emphasis in critical journals like The Partisan Review on psychological complexity in the novels of the early postwar era. Texts that Schaub analyzes in detail include Invisible Man, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “The White Negro,” and The End of the Road.

Acquired Aug 17, 2006
P.T. Campbell Bookseller, London, Ontario