Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War

Combining investigational criticism with cultural historiography, Rubin reveals that state sponsorship of the humanities played a crucial role in the transfer of authority from Britain to the United States in the early years of the Cold War, and he argues that this transfer redefined "the posit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.) Md.), 2013, Vol.20 (4), p.791
Main Author: Kaufman, Mark David
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903-1969)
Archives & records
Auden, W H (1907-1973)
Bacow, Lawrence S
Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986)
Camus, Albert (1913-1960)
Culture
Historical text analysis
Historiography
Ideology
Modernism
Orwell, George (Eric Blair) (1903-1950)
Said, Edward
Silone, Ignazio (1900-1978)
Theory
War
Writers
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Summary:Combining investigational criticism with cultural historiography, Rubin reveals that state sponsorship of the humanities played a crucial role in the transfer of authority from Britain to the United States in the early years of the Cold War, and he argues that this transfer redefined "the position of the writer in society, the conditions of humanistic practice, the ideology of world literature, and the relationship between writers and the rising dominance of new and efficient modes of mass transmission" (17). In the first chapter, he introduces a valuably reflective and interpretive perspective that is often lacking in otherwise informative accounts of the secret state's forays into the world of arts and letters, among which are Frances Stonor Saunders's Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999) and James Smith's more recent British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930-1960 (2013).
ISSN:1071-6068
1080-6601
DOI:10.1353/mod.2013.0096