Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944 - Hardcover

Kirrily Freeman; John Munro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 135010258X ISBN 13: 9781350102583

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

Synopsis

This original collection explores a number of significant texts produced in 1944 that define that year as a textual turning point when converging and contesting visions of a new world emerged. The questions posed at that moment, about capitalism, race, gender, empire, nation and cultural modernity, gave rise to debates that defined the global politics of their era and continue to delineate our own. Highlighting the goals, agendas and priorities that emerged for artists, intellectuals and politicians in 1944, Freeman and Munro rethink the intellectual history of the 20th century and the way these texts shaped the contours of the postwar world. With W.E.B Du Bois calling time on Jim Crow, Eric Williams linking race and class, Mao Zedong hailing revolutionary sacrifice, T.S Eliot critiquing individualism in verse and Charles de Gaulle declining to imagine empires end, these texts not only offer a snapshot of the most poignant debates of 1944 but represent the origins of many of our most controversial and urgent concerns today. Offering a reconceptualization of the 20th century, this is essential reading for any student or scholar of the intellectual, political, economic and cultural history of the postwar era.

About this title

About the Authors

Kirrily Freeman is Associate Professor of History at Saint Mary's University, in Halifax, Canada. Her publications include Bronzes to Bullets: Vichy and the Destruction of French Public Statuary, 1940-1944 (2009).

John Munro is Lecturer in United States history at the University of Birmingham, UK. His publications include The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945–1960 (2017).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 135010258X
• ISBN 13: 9781350102583
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Kirrily Freeman, John Munro