Synopses & Reviews
In America, the long 1950s were marked by an intense skepticism toward utopian alternatives to the existing capitalist order. This skepticism was closely related to the climate of the Cold War, in which the demonization of socialism contributed to a dismissal of all alternatives to capitalism. This book studies how American novels and films of the long 1950s reflect the loss of the utopian imagination and mirror the growing concern that capitalism brought routinization, alienation, and other dehumanizing consequences. The volume relates the decline of the utopian vision to the rise of late capitalism, with its expanding globalization and consumerism, and to the beginnings of postmodernism.
Review
...provides enlightening analyses of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and the films of Hitchcock and Disney...for graduate students and above...CHOICE
Review
[B]ooker offers an impressive survey of 1950s culture, high and low, with special attention to how the "end of ideology" debate rippled through diverse realms of cultural production.American Literature
Synopsis
In America, the long 1950s were marked by an intense skepticism toward utopian alternatives to the existing capitalist order. This skepticism was closely related to the climate of the Cold War, in which the demonization of socialism contributed to a dismissal of all alternatives to capitalism. This book studies how American novels and films of the long 1950s reflect the loss of the utopian imagination and mirror the growing concern that capitalism brought routinization, alienation, and other dehumanizing consequences. The volume relates the decline of the utopian vision to the rise of late capitalism, with its expanding globalization and consumerism, and to the beginnings of postmodernism.
Synopsis
The weak utopian vision of American literature and film of the long 1950s is shown in relation to the rise of late capitalism and postmodernism.
About the Author
M. KEITH BOOKER is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of numerous articles and books on modern literature and theory, including Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (Greenwood, 1994), Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition (1996), A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism (1996), Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel (1997), The African Novel in English (Heinemann, 1998), The Modern British Novel of the Left (Greenwood, 1998), The Modern American Novel of the Left (Greenwood, 1999), Film and the American Left (Greenwood, 1999), Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism (Greenwood, 2000), and Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War (Greenwood, 2001).
Table of Contents
Introduction: America as Utopia--Or Not
"Soiled, Torn, and Dead": The Bleak Vision of American Literary Fiction of the Long 1950s
Un-American Activities: American Realism and the Utopian Imagination in Leftist Fiction of the Long 1950s
Monsters, Cowboys, and Criminals: Jim Thompson and the Dark Turn in American Popular Culture in the Long 1950s
American Film in the Long 1950s: From Hitchcock to Disney
Postscript: Utopia, Postmodernism, and the Cold War
Works Cited
Index