Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

A Literary History, 1945–2008

Bryan M. Santin

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781108832656
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108962148
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 US Literature and the Modern Right at Midcentury: Conservative Modernism, Race, and the Cold War, 1945–1960
• Chapter 2 The Conservative Movement’s Foundational Fictions: Flannery O’Connor, Ayn Rand, and the Evolving Literary Forms of Conservatism, 1950–1964
• Chapter 3 The Strongbox of Custom: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and the Shifting Racial Logic of Postwar Conservatism, 1955–1972
• Chapter 4 Movement Conservatism, Neoconservatism, and the New Right: Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon in the Age of Reagan, 1970–1990
• Chapter 5 The American Novel and the Reagan Revolution: The Ascent of Toni Morrison in the Age of Conservative Pop Fiction, 1987–2000
• Epilogue: The Curious (Conservative) Case of Marilynne Robinson
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index