Beyond the apocalypse of closure: Nuclear anxiety in postmodern literature of the United States

Near the beginning of the Cold War, on accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner spoke of the future of fiction. Concerned by the insistence with which new fears of nuclear oblivion pressed themselves on the contemporary imagination, he worried that the true subject of literature, ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself’, would be forgotten.2 Yet nearly forty years later, in the final years of the Cold War, Martin Amis commented with astonishment and concern at ‘how little the mainstream [of literature] has had to say about the nuclear destiny’.3