Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post-1945 US Literary Studies

Abstract: This essay proposes a movements-based method for studying the development of US literature after World War II. It argues that the cultural materialist and institutionalist frameworks that have dominated post-1945 US literary studies in recent years have systematically overlooked the role of social movements as catalysts for cultural change. Through readings of the literary magazine n+1, the archival materials of Octavia Butler, and novels by a range of other major postwar US authors, it offers an account of how the collective mobilizations of the past sixty years—from Civil Rights, the New Left, and the Women's Movement to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo—have decisively shifted the contours of the US literary field.