The social life of poetry
Subtitle: Appalachia, race, and radical modernism
By: Chris Green.
Series: Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 279
ISBN-13: 9780230610934
Subjects: American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism; American poetry -- Appalachian Region -- History and criticism; European Americans -- Race identity; Whites -- Race identity -- United States; Cultural pluralism -- United States -- History; Modernism (Literature) -- United States; United States -- Race relations
Description: From Jewish publishers to Appalachian poets, Green's cultural study reveals the role of "Mountain Whites" in American racial history. Part One (1880-1935) explores the networks that created American pluralism, revealing Appalachia's essential role in shaping America's understanding of African Americans, Anglos, Jews, Southerners, and Immigrants. Drawing upon archival research and deft close readings of poems, Part Two (1934-1946) delves into the inner-workings of literary history and shows how diverse alliances used four books of poetry about Appalachia to change America's notion of race, region, and pluralism. Green starts with how Jesse Stuart and the Agrarians' defended Southern whiteness, follows how James Still appealed to liberals, shows how Muriel Rukeyser put Appalachia at the center of anti-fascism, and ends with how Don West and the Progressives' struggled to form interracial labor unions in the South
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Appalachia, race, and pluralism; title: Evangelizing an Anglo equality (1883-1908); title: New York City's cultural pluralists (1906-1930); title: Reactionary regionalism versus critical quarterlies (1925-1945); title: The social life of poetry; title: Racing the land with Jesse Stuart's Man with a bull tongue plow; title: "Authentic folk feeling" in James Still's Hounds on the mountain; title: Rebinding "The book of the dead" to Muriel Rukeyser's U.S. 1; title: The tight rope of democracy and Don West's Clods of southern earth.