In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

notes Introduction 1. See Walter Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956); Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and James Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York: Wiley , 1968). 2. The studies include the following: Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, eds., Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930–1940 (New York: Feminist Press, 1987); Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); James F. Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Barbara Foley, Radical Representations : Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Bill Mullen and Sherry Lee Linkon, eds., Radical Revisions : Rereading 1930s Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); James Edward Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Janet Galligani Casey, ed., The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004). 3. William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Even the most wide-ranging of these projects, Wald’s book, maintains the concentration upon Communist-af‹liated writers. 4. Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2001), 2. 5. As I will suggest slightly later in the introduction, there is a strong predilection in contemporary literary criticism and theory toward “radicalism” in several senses— including work interested in various forms of progressive politics. The notable work re›ecting this politics and taking up subjects within the period 1890 to 1940 is not, of course, focused entirely on the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, and includes the following: Caren Irr, The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); John Whalen-Bridge, Political Fiction and the American Self (Urbana: 339 University of Illinois Press, 1998); Arthur F. Redding, Raids on Human Consciousness : Writing, Anarchism, and Violence (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000); David Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Laura Hapke, Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); John Beck, Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); and Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). On many points this work is complementary to mine, and might be read as extending a conversation on progressive politics and American literature back to Herman Melville and other antebellum writers and forward to contemporary authors including Toni Morrison and Kathy Acker; Beck’s title, Writing the Radical Center, could well have been a subtitle for American Socialist Triptych. It is dif‹cult to generalize about this work, complex and heterogenous as it is, but one common point that emerges is the centrality of “cultural politics” in literature and literary criticism—a formulation that emphasizes the way politics is mediated through the cultural production of literature, and through this process of mediation, literary themes become a substitution for political action. Redding goes so far as to suggest that the speci‹c political af‹liations of the Progressive Era were not of particular interest to writers of that period because of (quoting Emma Goldman) “the muddle-headedness of the Left itself,” which led to “a failure for political action” but “becomes in ‹ction a wealth of imagined possibilities” (81). Not only does my study show that Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois did show a de‹nite interest in the political groups of their era; it also distinguishes between cultural work and political...

Share