Twentieth-Century Americanism: Identity and Ideology in Depression-Era Leftist Literature (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

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. This book addresses the field of American fiction and literary criticism during the years of the Great Depression in America. The political, social, and cultural upheavals that followed the stock market crash of 1929 made the thirties a complex decade during which leftist intellectuals merged new ideologies with long-existing structures of national identity. The conclusions reached, based on these attempted mergers of ideology and identity, were in turn altered by the national political developments that ensued as the country underwent modernizing reconfigurations of the national infrastructure. While political shifts altered the path of the radical left political movements, the literary culture produced by these movements was influenced, even more directly, by the increasing ubiquity of mass culture. Introduction : Revolutionary Symbolism : Depression-era Leftist Literature -- Ch. 1. Identity And Ideology In Robert Cantwell's The Land Of Plenty -- Ch. 2. Disguised Theology Of The Master Wizard : Critical And Scientific Marxism At The 1935 American Writers' Congress -- Ch. 3. I Was Not A Character In A Novel : Fictionalizing The Self In Agnes Smedley's Daughter Of Earth -- Ch. 4. Totality And John Dos Passos's U.s.a. -- Ch. 5. Standardized : Stereotypes Of The Depression In The Thirties Novels Of West And Steinbeck -- Ch. 6. The Artist's Dialectic : Race Authenticity In The Thirties Novels Of Richard Wright -- Conclusion : The Power Of Negative Thinking. Andrew C. Yerkes. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 155-162) And Index. Identity and Ideology in Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty Disguised Theology of the Master Wizard: Critical and Scientific Marxism at the 1935 American Writers’ Congress “I was not a character in a novel”: Fictionalizing the Self in Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth Totality and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Standardized: Stereotypes of the Depression in theThirties Novels of West and Steinbeck The Artist’s Dialectic: Race and Authenticity in Richard Wright’s Early Novels First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company