Twentieth-Century American Culture Series Editor: Martin Halliwell This academic series provides accessible but challenging studies of American culture in the twentieth century. Each title covers a specific decade and offers a clear overview of its dominant cultural forms and influential texts, discussing their historical impact and cultural legacy. Collectively the series reframes the notion of 'decade studies' through the prism of cultural production to rethink the ways in which decades are usually periodised. Broad contextual approaches to the particular decade are combined with textual case studies, focusing on themes of modernity, commerce, freedom, power, resistance, community, race, class, gender, sexuality, internationalism, war, technology and popular culture. American Culture in the 1940s Jacqueline Foertsch 'This readable, wide-ranging survey of US culture during a tumultuous decade of total war, postwar readjustment, and the onset of the Cold War brings 1940s culture vividly to life in all its diversity ... Jacqueline Foertsch evokes the appeal and bubbling ferment of popular culture without glossing over the reality of racism and other social problems.' Paul Boyer, Editor in Chief, The Oxford Companion to United States History This book explores the major cultural forms of 1940s America - fiction and non-fiction; music and radio; film and theatre; serious and popular visual arts - and key texts, trends and figures, from Native Son to Citizen Kane, from Hiroshima to HUAC, and from Dr Seuss to Bob Hope. After discussing the dominant ideas that inform the 1940s the book culminates with a chapter on the 'culture of war'. Rather than splitting the decade at 1945, Jacqueline Foertsch argues persuasively that the 1940s should be taken as a whole, seeking out links between wartime and postwar American culture. Key Features: * Focused case studies featuring key texts, genres, writers, artists and cultural trends * Detailed chronology of 1940s Amer

Jacqueline Foertsch is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Enemies Within: The Cold War and AIDS Crisis in Literature, Film and Culture (2001).