This book analyses the 1980s as a nuclear decade, focusing on British and United States fiction. Ranging across genres including literary fiction, science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, graphic novels, childrens and young adult literature, thrillers and horror, it shows how pressing nuclear issues were, particularly the possibility of nuclear war, and how deeply they penetrated the culture. It is innovative for its discussion of a nuclear transatlantic, placing British and American texts in dialogue with one another, for its identification of a vibrant young adult fiction that resonates with more conventionally studied literatures of the period and for its analysis of a politics of vulnerability animating nuclear debates. Placing nuclear literature in social and historical contexts, it shows how novels and short stories responded not only to nuclear fears, but also crystallised contemporary debates about issues of gender, the environment, society and the economy.
Late Cold War Literature and Culture is the first book properly to theorise the 1980s as a nuclear decade. In the early 1980s a resurgence of nuclear anxiety accompanied the increasingly bellicose Cold War rhetoric of both East and West. The possibility of nuclear war haunted the period and this had a profound impact on literature and culture. Not only were an unprecedented number of overtly nuclear fictions published, but revealing flashes of nuclear anxiety became common in mainstream literature.By reading 1980s British and United States texts (predominantly, but not only, fiction and prose), This book maps the development of a transatlantic nuclear culture that engaged with the broader global and domestic politics of the period. In theorises this through the emergence of a 'protect-protest' dynamic, in which the ability of the nuclear state to protect its citizens came under increasing scrutiny from nuclear and other proteslS(
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