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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Eric Bennett, "Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War" (U Iowa Press, 2015)
Description: During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity...