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Advance Praise
“This is an original and accomplished piece of scholarship that will make a significant contribution to the cultural history of the Cold War in the U.S. and the literary history of the American novel.”
Sean McCann, author of A Pinnacle of Feeling
“Take the volatile intersection of ambitious literary forays and the historical import of the Cold War. Add a scholar of keen intelligence who has read widely and who can make intriguing connections. The result is a book replete with fresh and striking insights into the perennial problem of freedom and fate. And that’s no accident.”
Stephen Whitfield, author of The Culture of the Cold War
“This is a valuable addition to Cold War studies, and fresh account of the relationship between narrative and the accidental during the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis is smart and wide ranging, and offers new ways of understanding how and why the period’s geopolitical conflict mattered to literature.”
Michael Szalay, author of Hip Figures
“No Accident, Comrade brilliantly demonstrates how the literary expression of chance became a powerful counter-trope in a Cold War world where narrative design often signified the dread of totalitarian state control. This book blazes new light across the political intensities of the postwar literary landscape.”
Leerom Medovoi, author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity
“The best chapters in No Accident, Comrade help us see afresh the conscious creativity underlying the novels written during the Cold War. Belletto’s necessary and welcome intervention promises to have an enduring impact.”
Donald Pease, author of The New American Exceptionalism
Reviews
“Belletto’s study is at the forefront of an effort to rethink what it is we talk about when we talk about the Cold War. The stakes for this research are high in a present-day political culture in which war is less a bracketed-off historical period than a permanent feature of American life. The way in which we demarcate the political domain is as critical an issue today as it was during the Cold War.”
Joseph Darda, Modern Fiction Studies
“Belletto’s major contribution to postwar literary studies is to demonstrate the centrality ofthe chance/design binary to the development of the postmodern novel. His exploration of anticommunist discourse provides a broad historical horizon for the otherwise claustrophobic world of Pynchonesque paranoia. By demonstrating the geopolitical ramifications of “narrative chance,” Belletto leaves us with the distinct suspicion that, just as there are no apolitical splatters in Pollock, there may be no accidents in postmodernism.”
Katie Fitzpatrick, Novel
“lively and illuminating . . . Belletto’s is a subtle and important analysis”
Theophilus Savvas, Journal of American Studies
“helpful in understanding the complicated politics of the 1950s. . . . For Belletto, chance is a useful term through which to study literature produced during the Cold War because it allows us to understand ‘why the singular, the individual, or the unassimilable could seem political in the first place,’ that is, why traditional politics no longer made sense in a world dominated by national security concerns.”
Robert Genter, American Literary History
“Belletto’s introduction cleverly mixes and intellectual history of chance with a concern for the uniquely literary (and especially novelistic) problems posed by chance: after all, how does one represent chance within the predetermined world of narrative causality? . . . later chapters offer compelling accounts of the role of chance in African American writing, the appeal and critique of game theory in American culture, and the persistence of the Cold War in contemporary fiction.”
Daniel Grausam, American Literature
“One of the most useful and effective aspects of No Accident, Comrade is that it suggests connections within a quite disparate body of fiction. . . . Belletto has opened up an approach which can be profitably applied to fiction dealing explicitly with the Cold War and also to neglected classics.”
David Seed, The Modern Language Review
“mobilizes abundant notes, many historical anecdotes, and an extensive bibliography in the service of an exciting addition to postwar literary history. . . . Belletto gives the concept of chance new historical and theoretical relevance.”
Damjana Mraovic-O’Hare, Twentieth-Century Literature
“Belletto’s discussion of the context and his readings of his chosen texts are all enticing and lucid, especially on game theory. . . . Copious notes and an extensive bibliography make the book especially valuable for those who are interested in how the Cold War affected literary form.”
B. Diemert, Choice