Politics and the Novel During the Cold War

"Agreeing with Irving Howe's contention that the political novel flourishes in times of civil turmoil, the prolific Caute sweeps through the work of 30-plus authors who reflected the Cold War experience from the Spanish Civil War to the late 1970s... The book's strength is its reach beyond Western European writing (Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Uwe Johnson, and others) to Soviet writing (in addition to Solzhenitsyn, Victor Serge, Vasily Grossman, Boris Pasternak, Lydia Chukovskaya, et al.), thus exposing Anglo-American readers to Soviet writing... Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers."-B. Diemert, Choice "As the memory of the horrors of Stalinism fades with the disappearance of those that lived through it, it will be the novels that were generated by the Cold War that will shape historical understanding. David Caute's new book will fascinate and inform readers, providing them with the context and insights they need to make sense of this important genre of literature."-Harvey Klehr "Caute's new book is the most authoritative study to date of politics and literature during the Cold War and one of the wisest and witties books of cultural criticism to appear for many years."-John Gray, Literary Review "[A]n exhaustive analysis of Cold War fiction is created, read, and criticized in the context of the last century's most rhetorical of conflicts."-Olga Voronina, The Russian Review