{"product_id":"workshops-of-empire-stegner-engle-and-american-creative-writing-during-the-cold-war-9781609383718","title":"Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War","description":"During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity of literature--of ideas bound to concrete images, of ideologies leavened with experiences--enshrined such values as no other medium could.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul--a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWorkshops of Empire\u003c\/i\u003e explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs--a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system--was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Iowa Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 10\/15\/2015\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781609383718\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 256\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.79lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.90h x 5.80w x 0.80d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eReview Citations: \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e 08\/03\/2015\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eChronicle of Higher Education\u003c\/i\u003e 11\/06\/2015 pg. 18\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e 11\/29\/2015 pg. 11\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eChoice\u003c\/i\u003e 05\/01\/2016\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Eric Bennett","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":36661864956060,"sku":"9781609383718","price":19.13,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/products\/img_c6cc3bd0-220f-4b77-8c26-41f5b3b9ec89.jpg?v=1603900460","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/workshops-of-empire-stegner-engle-and-american-creative-writing-during-the-cold-war-9781609383718","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}