Steven Belletto

Teaching interests: 20th century American literature and culture; the modern American novel; postmodernism; the Beats; the American 1950s; the American Studies program

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

Selected publications:

Books

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)

Essays

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

“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.