Reading America : : citizenship, democracy, and Cold War literature / / Kristin L. Matthews.

• Superior document: Print culture and the history of the book
• VerfasserIn: Matthews, Kristin L., 1973-
• Place / Publishing House: Amherst : : University of Massachusetts Press,, [2016]; 2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in print culture and the history of the book.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (226 pages) :; illustrations.

"During the Cold War, the editor of Time magazine declared, "A good citizen is a good reader." As postwar euphoria faded, a wide variety of Americans turned to reading to understand their place in the changing world. Yet, what did it mean to be a good reader? And how did reading make you a good citizen? In Reading America, Kristin L. Matthews puts into conversation a range of political, educational, popular, and touchstone literary texts to demonstrate how Americans from across the political spectrum--including "great works" proponents, New Critics, civil rights leaders, postmodern theorists, neoconservatives, and multiculturalists--celebrated particular texts and advocated particular interpretive methods as they worked to make their vision of "America" a reality. She situates the fiction of J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston within these debates, illustrating how Cold War literature was not just an object of but also a vested participant in postwar efforts to define good reading and citizenship" -- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Preface -- Introduction: "there is much to be gained by our reading" -- America reads: literacy and Cold War nationalism -- Reading for character, community, and country: J. D. Salinger's The catcher in the rye -- Reading to outmaneuver: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and African American -- Literacy in Cold War America -- Reading against the machine: Oedipa Maas and the quest for democracy in Thomas Pynchon's The crying of lot 49 -- Metafiction and radical democracy: getting at the heart of John Barth's Lost in the funhouse -- Confronting difference, confronting difficulty: culture wars, canon wars, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The woman warrior -- Conclusion: "reading makes a country great".