Literature And The Arts Since The 1960s

This collection of essays focuses on addressing the imaginative wake of the rebellious late 1960s, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on word-and-image relations. The volume showcases and discusses the impact of such processes on literature and the arts of that mythologized historical period. It explores the impact of its defining causes, hopes and regrets on the creative imagination. The awakening moment for that extraordinary momentous period in the global socio-political memory was May 1968, which came to be seen as the culmination and epitome of a series of processes involving protest, and the affirmation of previously silent or subaltern causes. Such processes and causes were predicated on challenges to established powers and mindsets, and hence on demands for change, which have had rich consequences in literature and the arts.

This collection of essays focuses on addressing the imaginative wake of the rebellious late 1960s, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on word-and-image relations. The volume showcases and discusses the impact of such processes on literature and the arts of that mythologized historical period. It explores the impact of its defining causes, hopes and regrets on the creative imagination. The awakening moment for that extraordinary momentous period in the global socio-political memory was May 1968, which came to be seen as the culmination and epitome of a series of processes involving protest, and the affirmation of previously silent or subaltern causes. Such processes and causes were predicated on challenges to established powers and mindsets, and hence on demands for change, which have had rich consequences in literature and the arts.

Al Filreis recasts 1960 as a turning point to offer a groundbreaking account of postwar culture. He examines an eclectic group of artistic, literary, and intellectual figures who strove to create a new language to reckon with the trauma of World War II and to imagine a new world.

By Betty Bright.

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.

This groundbreaking examination of the intersection between artistic practice and capitalism in the 1960s explores art's capacity to reflect on and reimagine economic systems and our place within them.

Fictional narratives of the late twentieth century often cross boundaries. This study argues that the undoing of structure in postmodern art form demands a different way of thinking and represents a commentary on the material and social conditions of the late twentieth century and beyond.