'Twentieth-Century Americanism'
Subtitle: Identity and Ideology in Depression-Era Leftist Fiction (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)
Publisher: Routledge
Published: August 12, 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 168
ISBN-13: 9780415975384
First sentence: 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.
Table of contents: label: 1
title: Identity and Ideology in Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty; label: 2
title: Disguised Theology of the Master Wizard:  Critical and Scientific Marxism at the 1935 American Writers’ Congress; label: 3
title: “I was not a character in a novel”:  Fictionalizing the Self in Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth; label: 4
title: Totality and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.; label: 5
title: Standardized: Stereotypes of the Depression in theThirties Novels of West and Steinbeck; label: 6
title: The Artist’s Dialectic: Race and Authenticity in Richard Wright’s Early Novels