Description: Based on an analysis of American anti-Communist politics in the 1950s, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction by concentrating on four recurrent figures (the world, the enemy, the secret, the catastrophe) in order to show that the two cultural fields participated in a common ideological program.
Brief description: Roland Végső is Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Review Quotes: "Mr. Végső has established a perspective on cold war literary and cultural politics informed by the most sophisticated post cold war political theory - Ranciere, Badiou, Laclau-Mouffe, Zizek. In providing this perspective, he has constructed a framework for the analysis of cold war cultural politics that is certain to exert a major influence on the accounts of that period for many years to come."-----Donald Pease, Dartmouth College