Curbing Containment: Cold War Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Introduction: Hot and Cold Rocks

“…Recent criticism on the literature and culture of the Cold War has stressed its variety and reach: its global status as, for many, a "hot" war; the way it penetrated a huge range of popular culture; the way it fostered a self-critical rhetoric in the West; and the way it was responsible for paradoxical effects, including the birth of a rebellious youth culture in America, and even (via the "new liberalism") the rise of identity politics in the 1970s (see Shannon 2000;Hendershot 2003;Medovoi 2005;Belletto 2007). The declassification of archival materials has yielded not just political studies like Peter Hennessy's The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (2003), but also more literary works like Claire Culleton's Joyce and the G-Men (2004) and Hugh Wilford's The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008) -Culleton's a study of the interaction between the FBI and literary modernism which reveals Hoover's tendrils of suspicion, directed at what he saw as a decadent and threatening movement, reaching out to encompass its authors and publishers, even outside the USA.…”