Better Red - The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur

Zusatztext Olsen and Le Sueur have not faltered in their determination to raise the voice of working class women. Nor have they ceased to encourage, work for, anticipate a just world. Better Red is a meticulous scrutiny of two exceedingly important creative and political lives. Klappentext Better Red is an interdisciplinary study addressing the complicated intersection of American feminism and the political left as refracted in Tillie Olsen's and Meridel Le Sueur's lives and literary texts. The first book-length study to explore these feminist writers' ties to the American Communist Party! it contributes to a re-envisioning of 1930s U.S. Communism as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis. At once loyal members of the male-dominated Communist Party and emerging feminists! Olsen and Le Sueur move both toward and away from Party tenets and attitudes - subverting through their writing formalist as well as orthodox Marxist literary categories. Olsen and Le Sueur challenge the bourgeois assumptions - often masked as classless and universal - of much canonical literature; and by creating working-class women's writing! they problematize the patriarchal nature of the Left and the masculinist assumptions of much proletarian literature! anticipating the concerns of "second wave" feminists a generation later. Zusammenfassung This study contributes to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis. It demonstrates how the writing of Olsen and le Sueur anticipated many of the concerns of "second wave" feminists, and how their feminist ideals related to the American Communist Left.

Product details

• Authors: Constance Coiner, Constance (Assistant Professor of English Coiner, Coiner Constance
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.03.1995
• EAN: 9780195056952
• ISBN: 978-0-19-505695-2
• No. of pages: 296
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; USA, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist, American English, Feminism & feminist theory, United States of America, USA, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Feminism and feminist theory, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000