Overview

"Telling America's Story to the World argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar US literature. Highlighting the role of liberal internationalism in US cultural outreach, Harilaos Stecopoulos contends that the state mainly sent authors like Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not just to demonstrate the achievements of US civilization but also to broadcast an American commitment to international cross-cultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors may not have helped the state achieve its propaganda goals-indeed, this rarely proved the case-but they did find their assignments an opportunity to ponder the international meanings and possibilities of US literature. For many of those figures, courting foreign publics inspired a reevaluation of the scope and form of their own literary projects. Testifying to the inadvertent yet integral role of cultural diplomacy in the worlding of US letters, works like The Mansion (1959), Life Studies (1959), ""Cultural Exchange"" (1961, 1967), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), and Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010) reimagine US literature in a mobile, global, and distinctly political register."

Full Product Details

Author:   Harilaos Stecopoulos (Associate Professor of English, Associate Professor of English, University of Iowa)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.40cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 24.00cm
Weight:   0.630kg
ISBN:  

9780192864635

ISBN 10:   0192864637
Pages:   320
Publication Date:   03 November 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

Preface Introduction 1: The Good Neighbor Theory of American Literature: Archibald MacLeish and the New World of the United Nations 2: Chau-vin-ism! Con-form-ity! Self-de-termi-nation! Freeeeeeeeee-dom! Ralph Ellison, Robert Lowell, and Occupied Salzburg 3: People to People, Writers to Writers: William Faulkner, the Snopes Problem, and Middlebrow Internationalism 4: Diasporic Diplomacy: Langston Hughes, the Africa Propaganda Campaign, and Black Literary Internationalism 5: Republic of Letters, Cockpit of Controversy: Arthur Miller, PEN International, and Literary Detente 6: A Harvest of Conversations Among Multitudes : Maxine Hong Kingston, Wittman Ah Sing, and the US-China Writers' Conferences Coda: Multicultural Diplomacy Bibliography

Reviews

Telling America's Story to the World is a superb work ... At the heart of Stecopoulos's story lie questions of power and agency that link the U.S. state agencies that sent writers abroad for propaganda purposes and the writers themselves, who rightly viewed themselves as ambassadors of their own endeavors, and who used their travels to carry out their own initiatives - often, in the process, reconfiguring their own relationship to the United States. Stecopoulos elegantly unpacks these competing agendas while also tracing how they factored into the development of U.S. literature and its place on the international stage since the late 1940s ... Telling America's Story to the World is a must-read that shows how knowledge of cultural diplomacy is indispensable to the study of U.S. literary history. * Deborah Cohn, Provost Professor, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University-Bloomington * Harilaos Stecopoulos's magisterial book makes a tremendous contribution to cold war studies, American literary studies, and diplomacy studies, fields that have rarely been put in extended dialogue with such rigorous attention to their own logics and concerns. The result is a major and important step forward in our understanding of how U.S. writers from the World War II era through the War on Terror played a role in propagating an image - multiple, multivalent and complex - of the United States during periods of war and occupation ... An astute critic as well as a sophisticated cultural and intellectual historian, he reads the complexities of the texts and authors he treats which produces a more nuanced account of the relationship between cold war literature and geopolitics. This is a book that all students and scholars of U.S. literature produced during the second half of the twentieth century will need to read. * Brian T. Edwards, Dean and Professor of English, Tulane University * So much has been written about the so-called Cultural Cold War, and the role of U.S. intellectuals in promoting it - and for that matter the role of the Cultural Cold War in defining American Studies - that it's pretty to think there's no more to be said. What Harilaos Stecopoulos shows, with his characteristic archival surprises, flashing wit, and political insight, is that the writers the U.S. state sent abroad for propaganda purposes often felt otherwise - making links, forging connections and non-state organizations, ultimately exploring the possibilities of a New International of cultural workers. The range, reach, intricacy, and buoyant storytelling of this superb study set entirely new terms for our understanding of literary diplomacy and offer a blockbusting model of American Studies. * Eric Lott, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism * A major study that finally gives readers of literature a persuasive picture of liberal internationalism's unpredictable effects, Telling America's Story to the World proves that U.S. efforts at cultural diplomacy amounted to more than enduring cartoon portraits of Cold Warriors at the CIA weaponizing novels, jazz, and abstract art for ideological combat. Instead, Harilaos Stecopoulos recovers how authors commandeered their roles as vexed ambassadors of U.S. democracy to forge distinct styles of worldliness. Writing with crystal prose and clear purpose, Stecopoulos combs a vast archive of literary diplomacy from the Popular Front to the War on Terror, and he beads together stunning readings of Ralph Ellison, Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes, Maxine Hong Kingston, and scores of others. This book is among the essential contributions to the geopolitics of U.S. literature. * Harris Feinsod, author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures * Telling America's Story to the World represents a major rethinking of the impact of cultural diplomacy on postwar US literature. While addressing the complicity of imaginative literature in American empire, Harilaos Stecopoulos powerfully and judiciously demonstrates that writers of many different kinds also spun out cross-cultural, internationalist visions of America and the world. In so doing, they often exceeded or even contradicted the aims of the state institutions that sponsored them. A bold, ambitious, yet nuanced study of the literature of alternative internationalisms. * Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry in a Global Age * This valuable contribution to Transnational American Studies investigates how U.S. state propaganda employed literary authors in the national interest. The author also shows how such governmental efforts produced an unintended counter-narrative. U.S. writers like Faulkner, Hughes, and Kingston served as cultural ambassadors only to grow more internationally aware and hence critical of U.S. exceptionalism. A unique combination of diplomatic and literary history, this book illuminates the complex globalization of postwar American literature. * John Carlos Rowe, USC Associates' Professor of the Humanities, University of Southern California * Telling America's Story to the World reveals the internationalist tenor of twentieth-century American literature by examining how novelists, essayists, and poets leveraged culture and aesthetics to create cosmopolitan connections. Harilaos Stecopoulos's research is extensive, his argument persuasive, and his writing fluid and lively. In its account of an alternative internationalism, this book is sure to reorient American literature's relation to the world. * Russ Castronovo, Tom Paine Professor of English and Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison *

Author Information

Harilaos Stecopoulos is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He earned his doctorate at the University of Virginia and is a renowned scholar in the field of US literature and culture. Stecopoulos's books include: A History of the Literature of the US South (2021), Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and US Imperialisms (2008), and Race and the Subject of Masculinities (1997).

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