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During the 1930s, radical young writers, artists, and critics associated with the Communist Party animated a cultural dialogue that was one of the most stimulating in American history. With the dawning of the Cold War, however, much of their work fell out
Combining biography, history, and literary theory, this work looks at three of the most significant women writers to emerge from American radicalism of the 1930s. Le Sueur, Olsen, and Herbst were influenced by the Communist movement of the time, but each also forged an independent vision of feminist socialist literary milieu. Drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and addressing the challenge of such new feminist theorists as Jean Bethke Elshtain, Roberts takes a theoretical approach that encompasses the social vision and feminist practice of the writers and places them in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. The study covers their lives from the turn of the century to the 1970s, with an emphasis on the 1930s; examines their views of the Cold War; links the three to the Progressive tradition; and analyzes their key literary works. Resources for analysis include historical and contemporary theory; excerpts from the radical press of the 1920s and 1930s; and primary materials from the writers themselves, including journals, notes, and unpublished archival materials.
"I'd rather fail in story writing than succeed in anything else," Josephine Herbst declared in 1913. The Iowa native's Trexler family trilogy, with Pity Is Not Enough as its first volume, shows clearly that Herbst in fact succeeded at storytelling. The book draws loosely on Herbst's family history, using Reconstruction's demise in Georgia to link the advance of free market capitalism to the North's abandonment of its commitment to racial justice. The protagonists-Catherine Trexler and her brother Joe, a carpetbagger embroiled in railroad scandals-are ripped apart financially and psychologically by competing codes of domesticity, Southern manners, and capitalism. In her introduction to the bo...
This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared during the decade. She focuses on the ways in which sexuality and maternity reconstruct the "classic" proletarian novel to speak about both the working-class woman and the radical female intellectual. Two well-known novels bracket this study: Agnes Smedley's Daughters of Earth (1929) and Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps (1942). In all, Rabinowitz surveys more than forty nove...
“Nothing is more anathema to a serious radical than regionalism,” Berkeley English professor Henry Nash Smith asserted in 1980. Although regionalism in the American West has often been characterized as an inherently conservative, backward-looking force, regionalist impulses have in fact taken various forms throughout U.S. history. The essays collected in Regionalists on the Left uncover the tradition of left-leaning western regionalism during the 1930s and 1940s. Editor Michael C. Steiner has assembled a group of distinguished scholars who explore the lives and works of sixteen progressive western intellectuals, authors, and artists, ranging from nationally prominent figures such as John...
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Polyvinyl chloride has played a key role in the development of the plastics industry over the past 40 years and continues to be a polymer of major importance. The reasons for its enormous versatility and range of application derive from a combination of the basic structure which gives rise to a relatively tough and rigid material and its ability to accept a range of plasticisers and other additives which can modify its physical characteristics to produce a range of flexible products. Two major problems, however, have tested the skill and ingenuity of PVC technologists since earliest times. One is the thermal instability of the material at the temperatures required for melt processing and fab...