Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s

Late Cold War Literature and Culture is the first book properly to theorise the 1980s as a nuclear decade. In the early 1980s a resurgence of nuclear anxiety accompanied the increasingly bellicose Cold War rhetoric of both East and West. The possibility of nuclear war haunted the period and this had a profound impact on literature and culture. Not only were an unprecedented number of overtly nuclear fictions published, but revealing flashes of nuclear anxiety became common in mainstream literature. By reading 1980s British and United States texts (predominantly, but not only, fiction and prose), This book maps the development of a transatlantic nuclear culture that engaged with the broader global and domestic politics of the period. In theorises this through the emergence of a 'protect-protest' dynamic, in which the ability of the nuclear state to protect its citizens came under increasing scrutiny from nuclear and other protesters.