After the end

Cold War culture and apocalyptic imaginations in the twenty-first century

David L. Pike

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781526174048
• eBook ISBN: 9781526174031
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

After the End argues that the cultural imaginaries and practices of the Cold War continue to deeply shape the present in profound but largely unnoticed ways across the global North and in the global South. The argument draws examples from literature and literary criticism, film, music, the historical and social scientific record and past and present physical sites to consider the bunker as a material form, an image and as a fantasy that took shape in the global North in the 1960s and that spread globally into the twenty-first century. After the End reminds us not only that most of the world's peoples have lived with or died from apocalyptic conditions for centuries, but that the Cold War imaginaries that grew from and fed those conditions, continue to survive as well.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: After the imminent apocalypse: the bunker fantasy since the Cold War
• 1: The fantasy of 1980s survivalism since the Reagan years
• 2: Survivance in fictions of survivalism since the Reagan years
• 3: The hedgehog, the tortoise, and the world: Switzerland, Albania, and the global bunker fantasy
• 4: Life in the ontological bunker: Cold War continuance, appropriation, and repurposing from America to Taiwan
• 5: Writing from the epistemological bunker: fictions of postnuclear apocalypse
• 6: Wall and tunnel: security, containment, and subversion
• Conclusion: Biosecurity, siloing, and the legacies of a shelter society
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Plates