Better red
Subtitle: the writing and resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur
By: Constance Coiner.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 282
Subjects: Olsen, Tillie -- Political and social views.; Le Sueur, Meridel -- Political and social views.; Working class writings, American -- History and criticism.; Communism and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; Feminism and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; Working class authors -- United States -- Biography.; Working class -- United States -- Intellectual life.; Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.; Women communists -- United States -- Biography.; Women authors, American -- Biography.; Working class in literature.
Description: Better Red is an interdisciplinary study addressing the complicated intersection of American feminism and the political left as refracted in Tillie Olsen's and Meridel Le Sueur's lives and literary texts. The first book-length study to explore these feminist writers' ties to the American Communist Party, it contributes to a re-envisioning of 1930s U.S. Communism as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis.

At once loyal members of the male-dominated Communist Party and emerging feminists, Olsen and Le Sueur move both toward and away from Party tenets and attitudes - subverting through their writing formalist as well as orthodox Marxist literary categories.

Olsen and Le Sueur challenge the bourgeois assumptions - often masked as classless and universal - of much canonical literature; and by creating working-class women's writing, they problematize the patriarchal nature of the Left and the masculinist assumptions of much proletarian literature, anticipating the concerns of "second wave" feminists a generation later.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 261-274) and index.