I
n 1945, much of the world was
reeling from three decades of
turmoil: two cataclysmic world
wars, separated by a global Great
Depression. In what proved to be
a short-lived period of hope, many
people struggled to make sense
of the destruction and rebuild a
better world. But as old empires
and powers declined, new ones
arose, resulting in the “clash of
cultures” between the West and
the Communist Eastern bloc. The
following decades were dominated
by this cold war, and the ever-
present danger of nuclear war.Aftermath of World War II
Literature in the postwar period
was inevitably influenced by
experiences of war. Jewish writers,
and especially Holocaust survivors
such as poet Paul Celan, attemptedto come to terms with the horrors
of the death camps. German
authors, including Günter Grass,
tackled the shameful legacy of
Nazism. In Japan, a generation
of writers examined the social
and political changes following
the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.
The negative effects were also
felt in those countries that had
been victorious in war. In England,
George Orwell, who was also a
veteran of the Spanish Civil War,
argued that the defeat of Nazism
had not removed the threat of
totalitarianism. In Animal Farm
and Nineteen Eighty-Four he
portrayed dystopian societies
that darkly satirized Stalin’s Soviet
Russia, capturing the pessimistic
mood of the Cold War. This mood
was also sharply felt in France,
where the experience of war andthe existential threat of the nuclear
bomb manifested itself as nihilism
rather than cynicism. Instead
of trying to find some sense in
life, writers such as Paris-based
Irishman Samuel Beckett, in his
play Waiting for Godot, pointed out
its absurdity, depicted with a grim
humor. In addition to this “theater
of the absurd,” black humor could
be found in American novels such
as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.New voices
The unsettled atmosphere of the
era after the war also inspired new,
postmodern writing techniques
which reflected this uncertainty:
narratives could be paradoxical,
fragmented, or presented out of
chronological order, often from
multiple perspectives, or that
of an unreliable narrator.248 INTRODUCTION
1945 1951 1953 1957
J. D. Salinger’s novel
The Catcher in the Rye
gives a first-person
account of adolescent
angst and teenage
rebellion.Samuel Beckett’s
absurdist drama
Waiting for Godot is first
performed in Paris in its
original French version.Jack Kerouac’s
depiction of American
counterculture in On
the Road is a defining
work of the beat
generation.Soviet troops liberate
the surviving prisoners
of the World War II
concentration camp
at Auschwitz, Poland.1949 1953 1955 1958
In San Francisco,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
and Peter D. Martin open
City Lights bookstore,
which later publishes
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.Vladimir Nabokov’s
sexually taboo novel
Lolita causes a scandal
and is banned in the
UK and France.Chinua Achebe’s debut
novel, Things Fall Apart,
describes the effects
of colonialism on
a traditional society
in Africa.In Nineteen Eighty-Four,
George Orwell describes a
dystopian totalitarian
state overseen by the
tyrannical Big Brother.US_248-249_Ch6_Intro.indd 248 08/10/2015 13:08