The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877458804 ISBN 13: 9780877458807

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2004

Synopsis

This collection of critical essays focuses on the fiction produced by American novelists during the Depression era and contributes to the newly emerging emphasis on 20th-century American literary radicalism. Casey consolidates recent studies providing a more specific consideration.

About this title

Review

""The Novel and the American Left explores how 1930s novelists used various literary strategies to offer both political commentary and literary innovation. Positioning the novel as an important form of intellectual inquiry and political protest, these contemporary critical essays explore a wide range of novels--some well known and others largely forgotten--to remind us that the leftist movement had many meanings, politically and culturally."

Lionel Trilling once characterized the 1930s as the indispensable decade for American intellectuals in the twentieth century; Janet Galligani Casey's distinctive and sweeping collection confirms that the 1930s were indispensable to the advance of the novel as well. With an eye to contemporary cultural theory, as well as gender and genre, race and ethnicity, and landscape and objectivity, her contributors cogently tackle an ample assortment of issues from knotty conceptual problems to the meticulous dissection of particular texts. Alan Wald, professor of English and American culture, University of Michigan, and author of "Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Left""

About the Author

Janet Galligani Casey is an independent scholar who has most recently taught at Skidmore College. A recent recipient of an NEH fellowship, she is the author of Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine, winner of the 1998 Modern Language Association's Prize for Independent Scholars.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877458804
• ISBN 13: 9780877458807
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Casey Janet Galligani