Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this article, I explore how US writers and intellectuals in the years following World War II responded aesthetically to the questions of complicity raised by anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. I discuss two short stories in particular: Vladimir Nabokov's “Double Talk” (1945) and Mary McCarthy's “Artists in Uniform” (1953). These form part of a group of literary works that share a striking and singular theme: the nightmare of the liberal intellectual finding herself or himself complicit with anti-Semitism in the confined space of a social encounter, and unable to escape. In reading these stories for their points of contact and shared concerns, we can begin to build an account of how complicity was addressed by members of a particular cultural formation in the early cold war, that of an East Coast intelligentsia characterized by its rejection of Stalinism, adherence to classically liberal political values and commitment to the aesthetic values of European modernism. More specifically, we gain an insight into why the aesthetics of complicity should be understood as a necessary and constitutive element of this group's intellectual ethos.

In this introduction to “Complicity in Post-1945 Literature: Theory, Aesthetics, Politics,” the editors address the intersections among literature, complicity, and capitalism. We begin by historicizing the concept of complicity and articulating its relationship to colonialism, slavery, and the spread of capitalist world markets. We then track the emergence and development of the field of complicity studies, and examine the role played by literature and aesthetics within that field. We explore the centrality of the Holocaust to the study of complicity, and—via a reading of Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666—we ask whether new conceptions of complicity are required to address more recent historical developments. Placing complicity studies in dialogue with the proliferating scholarship on neoliberalism, we conclude by naming complicity as the structure of feeling that corresponds to postwar liberalism, and consider the fate of complicity in the neoliberal and post-neoliberal eras.

This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov's fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself - that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism - this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author's characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov's understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov's major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov's attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov's heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov's location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.

Understood as 748 one of the key figures in the development of the hardboiled detective school, Chan- dler's legacy rests largely upon his reputation as a prose stylist working within the U.S. vernacular idiom.3 He made no secret of his apprenticeship as a pulp writer in the early to mid-1930s, inspired by the vernacular styles of Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett (his surviving notebooks contain exercises in imitation of Hemingway, \"the greatest living American novelist\").4 \"My fiction was learned in a rough school,\" he told Knopf, in marked contrast to his English public-school education.5 Hardboiled crime fiction, like the dime-novel Westerns from which it evolved, is popularly supposed to be a native genre growing organically \"like topsy\" from the American literary and cultural environment.6 For some literary historians hardboiled fiction, along with the films noirs that adapted its aesthetic for the screen, constitutes America's own \"pulp modernism\" to rival that of the European canon, emerging out of the period's two characteristic mass phenomena: unemployment and the culture industry.7 Sean Mc- Cann has demonstrated how a genre that began as a marginal and subversive art form became, in the 1930s, an expression of \"one of the exemplary faces of American popular identity.

This article explores the encounter between autonomous aesthetics, mass genre and the publishing category of literary fiction in Martin Amis'sNight Train. Taking the confused critical response to the novel as a starting point, I argue that the novel confounded the conventions governing the writing, circulation and consumption of contemporary literary fiction. In analyzing the narrative and stylistic strategies Amis deploys in exploiting the conventions of crime writing, I give an account of the relationship between high autonomous aesthetics and mass genre that madeNight Traininimical to the category of literary fiction. Putting Amis's term ““postmodern decadence”” to use as a way of conceptualizing this relationship historically, we are able to reorientate our sense of Amis's place in the cultural field and understand the set of factors that have determined his vexed reputation in contemporary literature.