Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature

Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature

Matthews, Kristin L.

Paperback

Series: Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1625342357
ISBN13: 9781625342355
Publisher: Univ Of Massachusetts Pr
Published: Nov 4 2016
Pages: 222
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

During the Cold War, the editor of Time magazine declared, A good citizen is a good reader. As postwar euphoria faded, a wide variety of Americans turned to reading to understand their place in the changing world. Yet, what did it mean to be a good reader? And how did reading make you a good citizen?

In Reading America, Kristin L. Matthews puts into conversation a range of political, educational, popular, and touchstone literary texts to demonstrate how Americans from across the political spectrum--including great works proponents, New Critics, civil rights leaders, postmodern theorists, neoconservatives, and multiculturalists--celebrated particular texts and advocated particular interpretive methods as they worked to make their vision of America a reality. She situates the fiction of J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston within these debates, illustrating how Cold War literature was not just an object of but also a vested participant in postwar efforts to define good reading and citizenship.

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