Abstract
The isolationism of the Monroe Doctrine, reaffirmed by simple-minded Neutrality Acts in the 1930s, became obsolete on 7 December 1941 when 353 Japanese carrier-borne aircraft made a surprise attack on America’s Pacific base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. Congress declared war on Japan the following day; Germany and Italy, as Japan’s allies, declared war on the United States on 11 December. America’s history since then has been one of increasingly intricate global involvement and fluctuating national confidence.
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Further reading
donald allen and robert greeley (eds), The New Writing in the USA (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
charles altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1984).
c. w. e. bigsby (ed.), The Second Black Renaissance, Essays in Black Literature (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1980).
robert bone, The Negro Novel in America, revised edn (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1965).
abraham chapman (ed.), Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature (London: New English Library, 1968).
ruby cohn, New American Dramatists 1960–1980 (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1982).
daniel hoffman, Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 1979).
randall jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953; repr. Vintage Books, 1955).
r. w. b. lewis, Trials of the Word: American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1965; repr. Yale Paperbound, 1966).
stan smith, A Sadly Contracted Hero: The Comic Self in Post-War American Fiction (British Association for American Studies: BAAS Pamphlets in American Studies, 5, 1981).
tony tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971).
eoffrey thurley, The American Moment: American Poetry in the Mid-Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1977).
helen vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 1980).
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© 1988 Marshall Walker
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Walker, M. (1988). War and post-war. In: The Literature of the United States of America. Macmillan History of Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19442-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19442-1_8
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