In this Book
- American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
summary
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.
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.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Introduction: Late Antifascism
- pp. 1-21
- 1. Postwar
- pp. 22-48
- 2. Scenes from a Class Struggle
- pp. 49-83
- 3. The Cult of Reason
- pp. 84-116
- 4. The “Homintern” Reconsidered
- pp. 117-149
- 5. Lonely Crusaders, Part I
- pp. 150-178
- 6. Lonely Crusaders, Part II
- pp. 179-215
- 7. Jews without Judaism
- pp. 216-249
- 8. Off Modernity’s Grid
- pp. 250-291
- Conclusion: The Sense of an Ending
- pp. 292-318
- A Note on Methodology
- pp. 319-324
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 391-395
Additional Information
ISBN
9781469601502
Related ISBN(s)
9780807835869, 9780807837344, 9781469618814
MARC Record
OCLC
818111643
Pages
432
Launched on MUSE
2012-12-20
Language
English
Open Access
No