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Zusatztext Smethurst fills a gap in the study of African American literature....Extensive notes on the text and bibliography provide insight into Smethurst's sources and analysis and provide a basis for further scholarly examination of the period and its issues. Klappentext The New Red Negro surveys African-American poetry from the onset of the Depression to the early days of the Cold War. It considers the relationship between the thematic and formal choices of African-American poets and organized ideology from the proletarian early 1930s to the neo-modernistlate 1940s. This study examines poetry by writers across the spectrum: canonical! less well-known! and virtually unknown. The ideology of the Communist Left as particularly expressed through cultural institutions of the literary Left significantly influenced the shape of African-American poetry in the 1930s and 40s! as well as the content. One result of this engagement of African-American writers with the organizedLeft was a pronounced tendency to regard the re-created folk or street voice as the authentic voice--and subject--of African-American poetry. Furthermore! a masculinist rhetoric was crucial to the re-creation of this folk voice. This unstable yoking of cultural nationalism! integrationism! and internationalism within a construct of class struggle helped to shape a new relationship of African-American poetry to vernacular African-American culture. This relationship included the representation of African-American workingclass and rural folk life and its cultural products ostensibly from the mass perspective. It also included the dissemination of urban forms of African-American popular culture! often resulting in mixed media high- low hybrids. Zusammenfassung The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 surveys African American poetry between the onset of the Depression and the early days of the Cold War. The New Red Negro considers the relationship between the thematic and formal choices of African American poets and organized ideology from the "proletarian" early 1930s to the "neo-modernist" late 1940s. This study examines poetry by writers who are canonical, less well-known, and virtually unknown....
