Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941

by Barbara Foley

Overview

In this revisionary study, Barbara Foley challenges prevalent myths about left-wing culture in the Depression-era U.S. Focusing on a broad range of proletarian novels and little-known archival material, the author recaptures an important literature and rewrites a segment of American cultural history long obscured and distorted by the anti-Communist bias of contemporaries and critics.
Josephine Herbst, William Attaway, Jack Conroy, Thomas Bell and Tillie Olsen, are among the radical writers whose work Foley reexamines. Her fresh approach to the U.S. radicals' debates over experimentalism, the relation of art to propaganda, and the nature of proletarian literature recasts the relation of writers to the organized left. Her grasp of the left's positions on the "Negro question" and the "woman question" enables a nuanced analysis of the relation of class to race and gender in the proletarian novel. Moreover, examining the articulation of political doctrine in different novelistic modes, Foley develops a model for discussing the interplay between politics and literary conventions and genres.
Radical Representations recovers a literature of theoretical and artistic value meriting renewed attention form those interested in American literature, American studies, the U. S. left, and cultural studies generally.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822313946
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/23/1993
Series:	Post-Contemporary Interventions Series
Pages:	486
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Barbara Foley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark Campus.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Part One

1. The Legacy of Anti-Communism 3

2. Influences on American Proletarian Literature 44

3. Defining Proletarian Litearture 86

4. Art or Propaganda? 129

5. Race, Class, and the "Negro Question" 170

6. Women and the Left in the 1930s 213

Part Two

7. Realism and Didacticism in Proletarian Fiction 249

8. The Proletarian Fictional Autobiography 284

9. The Proletarian Bildungsroman 321

10. The Proletarian Social Novel 362

11. The Collective Novel 398

Afterword 443

Index 447

Editorial Reviews

"Foley succeeds admirably in demonstrating that the proletarian novel is indeed worth reexamining from a variety of points of view as an essential way in which we may understand the American 1930s more accurately. This is a really important book in its field, a field wide enough to include not only literature, but history and politics."--Walter Rideout, University of Wisconsin, Madison

From the Publisher

Using the term "U.S. proletarian fiction" to refer to "novels written in the ambience of the Communist-led cultural movements that arose and developed in the United States in the context of the Great Depression," Foley (English, Rutgers U.) both rescues proletarian literature from undeserved neglect and also subjects it to a politically rigorous and historically informed critique. Her principal interest is not in detailed readings of individual texts, but in the larger claims that can be made about politics and representational strategy in proletarian fiction. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews