ENGLISH

Twentieth-Century Americanism : Identity and Ideology in Depression-Era Leftist Literature

By Andrew Yerkes

Book information

Publisher
Taylor & Francis Group
Year
2005
ISBN
9781135491246, 9780415975384
LCC
PS228.C6 Y47 2013
Language
english
Format
EPUB
Filesize
546 kB (559404 bytes)
Series
Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Ser.
Pages
179\0
Time added
2023-08-05 19:36:27
American -- History and criticism. ; Right and lefAmerican fiction -- 20th century -- History and cr

Description

First Published in 2005. 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 Lukcs.

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