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The main purpose of the book is to expand the scope of revisionary studies of the thirties by analyzing novels using recent innovations in critical theory. The book adds to the research of Barbara Foley, Michael Denning, Alan Wald, and others who have challenged Cold-War-era accounts of the decade's socialist and communist culture. The book explores leftist literature from the thirties as balanced between two antithetical philosophical modalities: identity and ideology. Writers create identitarian fiction, he argues, as they attempt to appeal to a mainstream audience using familiar types and patterns culled from mass culture. They engage ideology, on the other hand, when they use narrative as a means of critiquing those same types and patterns using strategies of ideological critique similar to those of their European contemporary Georg Lukács.
List of contents
Introduction Revolutionary Symbolism: American Depression-Era Leftist Literature Chapter One Identity and Ideology in Robert Cantwell's The Land of Plenty Chapter Two Disguised Theology of the Master-Wizard:Critical and Scientific Marxism in Depression-Era Literary CriticismChapter ThreeI was not a character in a novel: Fictionalizing the Self in Agnes Smedley's Daughter of EarthChapter Four Standardized:Stereotypes of the Depression in the Thirties Novels of West and SteinbeckChapter Five The Artist's Dialectic: Race Authenticity in the Thirties Novels of Richard WrightConclusion The Power of Negative Thinking
About the author
Andrew Yerkes is an adjunct professor of English at the University of St. Thomas. He has taught and researched the recurrence of historiographic patterns of apocalypse and millennium in American fiction, and he published on this topic in Routledge's Encyclopedia of Millennialismand Millennial Movements (2002).
Summary
The main purpose of the book is to expand the scope of revisionary studies of the thirties by analyzing novels using recent innovations in critical theory. The book adds to the research of Barbara Foley, Michael Denning, Alan Wald, and others who have challenged Cold-War-era accounts of the decade's socialist and communist culture. The book explores leftist literature from the thirties as balanced between two antithetical philosophical modalities: identity and ideology. Writers create identitarian fiction, he argues, as they attempt to appeal to a mainstream audience using familiar types and patterns culled from mass culture. They engage ideology, on the other hand, when they use narrative as a means of critiquing those same types and patterns using strategies of ideological critique similar to those of their European contemporary Georg Lukács.
