New Miseries in Old Attire: Nuclear Adolescent Novels Published in the United States in the 1980s

This paper addresses a group of novels on nuclear war written especially for adolescents which were published in the United States throughout the 1980s. Investigating the political, social and literary shifts, which eventuated in turning nuclear war into a proper subject for young people, the paper goes on to scrutinize how nuclear weaponry and war were represented by these literary texts. What themes and literary strategies were employed by authors of adolescent literature in integrating the nuclear issue? What were the political attitudes they endorsed, making nuclear war suitable for the young? By a close reading of Lynn Hall’s If Winter Comes (1984), and James Douglass Forman’s Doomsday Plus Twelve (1986), the paper demonstrates how American nuclear fiction for the young actually failed to oppose official pro-nuclear policies, conveying tolerance for and even indirect approval of the nuclear status quo.