This book analyses the 1980s as a nuclear decade, focusing on British and United States fiction. Ranging across genres including literary fiction, science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, graphic novels, children's and young adult literature, thrillers and horror, it shows how pressing nuclear issues were, particularly the possibility of nuclear war, and how deeply they penetrated the culture. It is innovative for its discussion of a "nuclear transatlantic," placing British and American texts in dialogue with one another, for its identification of a vibrant young adult fiction that resonates with more conventionally studied literatures of the period and for its analysis of a "politics of vulnerability" animating nuclear debates. Placing nuclear literature in social and historical contexts, it shows how novels and short stories responded not only to nuclear fears, but also crystallised contemporary debates about issues of gender, the environment, society and the economy.

Daniel Cordle is Reader in English and American Literature at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He has worked extensively on literature and science, and on the literary and cultural representations of nuclear technology. He is the author of numerous articles on these topics and of two monographs: Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate (1999) and States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (2008). At Nottingham Trent he teaches a specialist module in nuclear literature, as well as working across the curriculum in British and American literature, with an emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.