The making of James Agee
By: Hugh Davis.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Knoxville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 318
ISBN-13: 9781572336070
Subjects: Agee, James, -- 1909-1955 -- Criticism and interpretation
Genres: Criticism and interpretation
Description: "In The Making of James Agee, Hugh Davis takes a comprehensive look at Agee's career, showing the interrelatedness of his concerns as a writer. A full view of Agee's oeuvre, Davis argues, illuminates its deeply political nature and reveals a debt to various sources, particularly European surrealism, that have been little noted by previous Agee scholars." "Davis challenges the view of Agee that has persisted since his death - that he is best understood primarily as a romantic individualist at odds with convention and the literary mainstream - and argues that this myth was largely constructed by friends and associates who were so immersed in the tenets of modernism that they distorted Agee's work (and aesthetic intent) in an attempt to purify it in modernist terms. In revealing a writer of far greater complexity than the myth allows, Davis explores, for example, the leftist poetry that Agee wrote in the 1930s, which was almost completely suppressed by his editors. He also throws a fresh light on Agee's collaboration with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and reevaluates A Death in the Family in light of recent scholarship that has produced an almost entirely new version of the novel, one much closer to Agee's original intentions."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 291-303) and index.
Table of contents: title: "Death of a poet": the Agee myth and the Agee canon; title: "The love of Jesus and the mind of Marx": Agee's proletarian poetry of the 1930s; title: "It is funny if I am a surrealist": Agee and the avant-garde; title: "An art and a way of seeing": Walker Evans, Agee, and anti-graphic photography; title: "Syncopations of chance": let us now praise famous men as surrealist ethnography; title: "By any virile standard": a death in the family and popular culture.