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In this revisionary study, Barbara Foley challenges prevalent myths about left-wing culture in the Depression-era U.S. Focusing on a broad range of proletarian novels and little-known archival material, the author recaptures an important literature and rewrites a segment of American cultural history long obscured and distorted by the anti-Communist bias of contemporaries and critics.
Josephine Herbst, William Attaway, Jack Conroy, Thomas Bell and Tillie Olsen, are among the radical writers whose work Foley reexamines. Her fresh approach to the U.S. radicals' debates over experimentalism, the relation of art to propaganda, and the nature of proletarian literature recasts the relation of writers to the organized left. Her grasp of the left's positions on the "Negro question" and the "woman question" enables a nuanced analysis of the relation of class to race and gender in the proletarian novel. Moreover, examining the articulation of political doctrine in different novelistic modes, Foley develops a model for discussing the interplay between politics and literary conventions and genres.
Radical Representations recovers a literature of theoretical and artistic value meriting renewed attention form those interested in American literature, American studies, the U. S. left, and cultural studies generally.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Preface vii
Part One
1. The Legacy of Anti-Communism 3
2. Influences on American Proletarian Literature 44
3. Defining Proletarian Litearture 86
4. Art or Propaganda? 129
5. Race, Class, and the "Negro Question" 170
6. Women and the Left in the 1930s 213
Part Two
7. Realism and Didacticism in Proletarian Fiction 249
8. The Proletarian Fictional Autobiography 284
9. The Proletarian Bildungsroman 321
10. The Proletarian Social Novel 362
11. The Collective Novel 398
Afterword 443
Index 447
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Barbara Foley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark Campus.
