Steven Belletto

Teaching interests: 20th century American literature and culture; the modern American novel; postmodernism; the Beats; American Modernism/the Harlem Renaissance; the American 1950s

Research interests: Cold War literature and culture; the Beats; theories of narrative and postmodernity; the broad relationship between aesthetics and politics

Selected publications:

Books

Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans (Bloomsbury, 2025)

The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac, editor (Cambridge UP, 2024)

For You I Would Make an Exception (Vine Leaves Press, 2023)

The Beats: A Literary History (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War, co-editor (Iowa, 2019)

American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960, editor (Cambridge UP, 2018)

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats, editor (Cambridge UP, 2017)

No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (Oxford UP, 2012).

American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment, co-editor (Iowa, 2012)

Selected Essays

“A (Surprising) History of Early Academic Responses to the Beats,” in The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation, ed. Erik Mortenson and Tony Trigilio (Clemson UP, 2023). 23-43.

“‘A Sinister New kind of Efficiency’: Kerouac’s Cold War.”Journal of Beat Studies 10 (2022). 5-23.

“Tuli Kupferberg’s Yeah: A Satyric Excursion.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 79.1 (Spring-Summer 2022). 103-130.

“Finding Hermes in the Oil Stain: Norse’s Early Work,” in Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate, ed. A. Robert Lee and Douglas Field (Clemson, UP, 2022). 71-86.

“The Beats,” in The World of Bob Dylan, ed. Sean Latham (Cambridge UP, 2021). 169-180.

“Yugen at the Front,” in The Beats: Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry, ed. Matt Theado (Clemson UP, 2021). 63-78

“Teaching Beat Little Magazines,” in The Beats: A Teaching Companion, ed. Nancy McCampbell Grace (Clemson UP, 2021). 47-60

“The Beat Generation Meets the Hungry Generation: U.S.-Calcutta Networks and the 1960s ‘Revolt of the Personal.’” Humanities 8.3 (January 2019): 1-17.

“African American Literature,” in American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960. 116-129.

“From Nuclear Fear to Shades of Gray: The End of the Cold War,” in American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Cambridge UP, 2018). 310-323.

“Julian Mayfield and Alternative Civil Rights Literatures.” Twentieth Century Literature 63.1 (March 2017): 115-140.

“The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel.” American Literature 87.1 (March 2015): 51-77.

“Inventing Other Realities: What the Cold War Means for Literary Studies,” in Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (Oxford UP, 2012). 75-88.

“Digression, Ethical Work, and Salinger’s Postmodern Turn.” LIT 22.1 (2011): 4-24.

“The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State.” American Quarterly 61.2 (June 2009): 333-357.

“Rescuing Interpretation with Mark Danielewski: The Genre of Scholarship in House of Leaves.” Genre 42.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2009): 99-117.

“Cabaret and Antifascist Aesthetics.” Criticism 50.4 (Fall 2008): 609-630.

“Kerouac His Own Historian: Visions of Cody and the Politics of Historiography.” Clio 37 (Spring 2008): 193-218.

“The Zemblan Who Came in from the Cold, or Pale Fire, Chance, and the Cold War.” ELH 73 (Fall 2006): 755-780.

“Of Pickaninnies and Nymphets: Race in Lolita.” Nabokov Studies 9 (2005): 
1-17.