Reading America : citizenship, democracy, and Cold War literature / Kristin L. Matthews.
Matthews, Kristin L., 1973- author.
2016
PS3613.A8488 R43 2016
Available Online

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Title Reading America : citizenship, democracy, and Cold War literature / Kristin L. Matthews.
Author Matthews, Kristin L., 1973- author.
ISBN 9781625342355
9781625342348
9781613764695 (electronic book)
Published Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2016]
Copyright ©2016
Language English
Description 1 online resource (226 pages) : illustrations.
Call Number PS3613.A8488 R43 2016
Dewey Decimal Classification 810.9/0054
Summary "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" -- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Series Studies in print culture and the history of the book.
Available in Other Form Reading America : citizenship, democracy, and Cold War literature.
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Preface
Introduction: "there is much to be gained by our reading"
America reads: literacy and Cold War nationalism
Reading for character, community, and country: J. D. Salinger's The catcher in the rye
Reading to outmaneuver: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and African American
Literacy in Cold War America
Reading against the machine: Oedipa Maas and the quest for democracy in Thomas Pynchon's The crying of lot 49
Metafiction and radical democracy: getting at the heart of John Barth's Lost in the funhouse
Confronting difference, confronting difficulty: culture wars, canon wars, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The woman warrior
Conclusion: "reading makes a country great".

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