Writers and Miners: Activism and Imagery in America

by David C. Duke

Overview

Coal miners evoke admiration and sympathy from the public, and writers—some seeking a muse, others a cause—traditionally champion them. David C. Duke explores more than one hundred years of this tradition in literature, poetry, drama, and film. Duke argues that as most writers spoke about rather than to the mining community, miners became stock characters in an industrial morality play, robbed of individuality or humanity. He discusses activist-writers such as John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, and Denise Giardina, who assisted striking workers, and looks at the writing of miners themselves. He examines portrayals of miners from The Trail of the Lonesome Pine to Matewan and The Kentucky Cycle. The most comprehensive study on the subject to date, Writers and Miners investigates the vexed political and creative relationship between activists and artists and those they seek to represent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813122373
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	09/13/2002
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David C. Duke, professor of history at Marshall University, is the author of Distant Obligations: Modern American Writers and Foreign Causes.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction	1
1.	Idiosyncratic Activism while Assisting "The Other"	9
2.	Two Appalachians: Don West and Denise Giardina	46
3.	Coal Mining in the Novel, the Short Story, and Genre Fiction	67
4.	Stage and Screen	101
5.	Coal Mining Fiction for the Young	126
6.	Coal Mining and the Poetic Imagination	144
7.	Voices from within the Mining Community	173
	Conclusion	219
	Notes	225
	Index	263

Editorial Reviews

Highly informative, widely-researched, ground-breaking.... General readers and scholars alike will find this volume an enormously useful resource because of the wealth of writers and texts it surveys.

Journal of Appalachian Studies

Duke's attempt to shatter the myths that surround mining is welcome, particularly as the industry moves away from traditional mining practices, and serves to tell us that stereotyping is not exclusive to ethnicity or region.

Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"Highly informative, widely-researched, ground-breaking.... General readers and scholars alike will find this volume an enormously useful resource because of the wealth of writers and texts it surveys." — Journal of Appalachian Studies

"Duke's attempt to shatter the myths that surround mining is welcome, particularly as the industry moves away from traditional mining practices, and serves to tell us that stereotyping is not exclusive to ethnicity or region." — Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

From the Publisher

Duke (history, Marshall U.) examines professional and nonprofessional writers who engaged in a discourse about popular perceptions of coal mining and the mining life in the US, some even becoming directly involved in the affairs of the mining community. Nonfiction, novels and short stories, stage and screen, fiction for the young, poetry, and voices from within the mining community are all within his view. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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