Overview

Axis/Axes to Grind studies various political themes in American World War II novels of three decades. These themes include “big picture” novels that interpret the war’s meaning and predict the postwar political climate (The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions) and novels that dramatize rebellions against military authority (From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny and Catch-22).  “Political” also includes conflicts between various minorities and the dominant socio-political culture (White, Christian and heterosexual).  Racial conflicts appear in If He Hollers Let Him Go, And Then We Heard the Thunder and Guard of Honor); subversive gay themes inform The Gallery; anti-Semitic conflicts appear in several novels, particularly the Holocaust novel Point of No Return.  War novels written well after the war tend to see the war through the lens of the author's own times. Thus, the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war inform the pacifism in Slaughterhouse-Five.  And in Gravity's Rainbow, the transnational cartels that enable the V-2 rocket attacks against England prefigure the military-industrial complex of Pynchon's time.

Full Product Details

Author:   Milton A. Cohen
Publisher:   Clemson University Digital Press
Imprint:   Clemson University Digital Press
ISBN:  

9781638041771

ISBN 10:   1638041776
Pages:   244
Publication Date:   03 June 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments and Dedication Introduction                                                                                                                            Chapter 1        Looking Ahead: Two “Big Picture” Views                                                     of the War’s Meaning and Post-war America                                                            Chapter 2        Inconvenient Minorities                                                                                Chapter 3        The Soldier and the System: Three War Novels of the 1950s Era                Chapter 4        Looking Back to Look Ahead: Two Novels of the Late 1960s                     and Early1970s                                                                                              Conclusion  

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Author Information

Milton Cohen has written books on modernists (Cummings and Hemingway) and modernist groups. More recently, his books have studied the interactions between modernist poets and leftist critics and 1930s novelists and leftist politics. Axis/Axes to Grind expands this study of literature and politics to World War II Novels. Cohen has also authored a collection of plays, American Glimpses, about the 1930s and 1940s.

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