American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War - Couverture souple

Wald, Alan M.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0807835862 ISBN 13 : 9780807835869

Editeur : The University of North Carolina Press, 2012

Synopsis

American Night, the final volume of an unprecedented trilogy, brings Alan Wald's multigenerational history of Communist writers to a poignant climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, Wald reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The resulting literature, Wald shows, is a haunting record of fracture and struggle linked by common structures of feeling, ones more suggestive of the ""negative dialectics"" of Theodor Adorno than the traditional social realism of the Left.
Establishing new points of contact among Kenneth Fearing, Ann Petry, Alexander Saxton, Richard Wright, Jo Sinclair, Thomas McGrath, and Carlos Bulosan, Wald argues that these writers were in dialogue with psychoanalysis, existentialism, and postwar modernism, often generating moods of piercing emotional acuity and cosmic dissent. He also recounts the contributions of lesser known cultural workers, with a unique accent on gays and lesbians, secular Jews, and people of color. The vexing ambiguities of an era Wald labels ""late antifascism"" serve to frame an impressive collective biography.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Alan M. Wald is a professor in the Department of English and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. His six previous books include The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s and Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date d'édition: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0807835862
• ISBN 13: 9780807835869
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 432
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible