NIGHTMARE ENVY & OTHER STORIES - American culture and european reconstructions by george blaustein

Nightmare Envy and Other Stories examines what it meant to be an Americanist in the 20th century, tracing four routes through the midcentury decades. This scholarly work explores the hidden history of American Studies across the United States, Europe, and Japan; the evolution of national character in anthropology; the tension between military occupation and cultural diplomacy in postwar Europe; and the emergence of the American Renaissance through F.O. Matthiessen's radical literary canon. Drawing on American and European archives, the book weaves cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic history with portraits of key figures including Matthiessen, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, David Riesman, Alfred Kazin, and Ralph Ellison. It excavates the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization, where displaced persons, former Nazis, budding Communists, and Americans gathered around shared cultural ground. The postwar period emerges as a pivotal moment when the ruin of Europe reshaped how writers and intellectuals understood America. Some saw the United States as cultural redeemer; others witnessed a stereotypical America—civilised but culturally impoverished—overtake a stereotypical Europe rich in culture yet devastated by war. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories chronicles these American encounters with European disaster and European readings of American fiction, exploring the chasms culture had to bridge.