Workshops of Empire

Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs--a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system--was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.