Comrades and critics
Subtitle: women, literature and the Left in 1930s Canada
By: Candida Rifkind.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Toronto
Language: eng
Number of pages: 268
ISBN-13: 9780802092670
Subjects: Canadian literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Women authors, Canadian -- 20th century -- Political and social views; Socialism and literature -- Canada -- History -- 20th century; Right and left (Political science) in literature; Modernism (Literature) -- Canada; Nineteen thirties
Description: "Comrades and Critics is the first full-length study of Canada's 1930s literary left. Challenging dominant perceptions that this decade was a lull between the more celebrated modernist enterprises of the 1920s and 1940s, Candida Rifkind argues that the events of the 1930s - from mass unemployment, to the dustbowl, to the Spanish Civil War - galvanized a generation of writers, leading them to unite artistic practice and political action in provocative and influential ways." "Analyzing and recovering much-neglected poems, plays, manifestoes, and documentaries, Rifkind demonstrates how leftist cultural production came to dominate English-Canadian literature by the end of the decade. She pays particular attention to the significant role that women writers played in this period and examines a diverse group of writers that included Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird, and Toby Gordon Ryan. These writers negotiated the struggle to revolutionize both literature and politics, while being subject to the gender hierarchies of socialism and literary modernism that continued long after the thirties came to an end."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [237]-258) and index.