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The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression recovers a mostly forgotten record of how the people who lived through the Depression understood its suffering in novels, stories, poems, and political cartoons. It brings to light a vast archive of literary and pictorial analogues to the famous documentary photographs that burned the Depression into American visual memory.
List of contents
- 1. Introduction: The Poetics of the Stiff
- 2. A Poetics of the Great Depression: Style and Aesthetics in Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing
- 3. How to Make a Queer: The Erotics of Begging; or, Down and Out in the Great Depression
- 4. A Collage of Breadlines and Restaurants: Waiting for Nothing and the Reinvention of Time
- 5. Hungry a Long Time: Poverty and the Great Depression in the Early Poetry of Langston Hughes
- 6. Life on Relief in the Short Fiction of Dorothy West and Martha Gellhorn
- 7. Conclusion: Depression Poverty and American Literary Studies
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Acknowledgments
About the author
Robert Dale Parker is the Frank Hodgins Professor of American Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has published two books on Faulkner and a book on Elizabeth Bishop as well as
The Invention of Native American Literature,
The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft,
Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, and, from Oxford University Press,
How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies.
Summary
The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression recovers a mostly forgotten record of how the people who lived through the Depression understood its suffering in novels, stories, poems, and political cartoons. It brings to light a vast archive of literary and pictorial analogues to the famous documentary photographs that burned the Depression into American visual memory.
