Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature

Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature PDF

Author: Anthony Dawahare

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-10-19

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 1498578748

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Contrary to previous studies of Tillie Olsen’s writing, Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature analyzes the impact of one of the most important philosophies of the last century, dialectical materialism, on the form and content of Olsen’s fiction. By revealing the unconceptualized dialectics of Olsen’s work and its appreciation by scholars and casual readers, this study achieves a dialectical synthesis that incorporates and extends the insights of and about Olsen in terms of dialectical materialism. By foregrounding Olsen’s dialectical approach, it explains and largely resolves apparent contradictions between her Marxism and feminism; her depictions of class, race, and gender; the literature of her earlier and later periods; and her use of realist and modernist literary forms and techniques. Consequently, this project makes a case for the importance of Olsen’s Marxist education during the “Red Decade” of the 1930s and within the U.S. proletarian literary movement.

The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939

The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939 PDF

Author: Laurie J. C. Cella

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2019-09-06

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1498581218

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As working women invaded the public space of the factory in the nineteenth century, they challenged Victorian notions of female domesticity and chastity. With virtue at the forefront of discussions regarding working women, aspects of working-class women’s culture—fashion, fiction, and dance halls—become vivid signifiers for moral impropriety, and attempts to censure these activities become overt attempts to censure female sexuality in the workplace. The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939 argues that these informal and often ignored “trifles” of female community provided the building blocks for female solidarity in the workplace. While most critical approaches to working-class fiction emphasize female suffering rather than agency, this book argues that working women themselves viewed aspects of consumer culture and new avenues for courtship as extensions of their rights as breadwinners. The strike itself is an intense moment of political upheaval that lends itself to more extensive personal and sexual freedoms. Through its analysis of strike novels, this book provides a fuller picture of working-class women as they simultaneously navigate new identities as “working ladies” and enter the dramatic and sometimes violent world of labor activism. This book is recommended for scholars of literary studies, women’s studies, and US history.

Richard Wright in Context

Richard Wright in Context PDF

Author: Michael Nowlin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-07-22

Total Pages: 652

ISBN-13: 1108803296

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Richard Wright was one of the most influential and complex African American writers of the twentieth century. Best known as the trailblazing, bestselling author of Native Son and Black Boy, he established himself as an experimental literary intellectual in France who creatively drew on some of the leading ideas of his time - Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism - to explore the sources and meaning of racism both in the United States and worldwide. Richard Wright in Context gathers thirty-three new essays by leading scholars relating Wright's writings to biographical, regional, social, literary, and intellectual contexts essential to understanding them. It explores the places that shaped his life and enabled his literary destiny, the social and cultural contexts he both observed and immersed himself in, and the literary and intellectual contexts that made him one the most famous Black writers in the world at mid-century.

Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary

Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary PDF

Author: Alice Craven

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2014-07-31

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1623562317

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In African American fiction, Richard Wright was one of the most significant and influential authors of the twentieth century. Richard Wright in a Post-Racial America analyses Wright's work in relation to contemporary racial and social issues, bringing voices of established and emergent Wright scholars into dialogue with each other. The essays in this volume show how Wright's best work asks central questions about national alienation as well as about international belonging and the trans-national gaze. Race is here assumed as a superimposed category, rather than a biological reality, in keeping with recent trends in African-American studies. Wright's fiction and almost all of his non-fiction lift beyond the mainstays of African-American culture to explore the potentialities and limits of black trans-nationalism. Wright's trans-native status, his perpetual "outsidedness" mixed with the "essential humanness" of his activist and literary efforts are at the core of the innovative approaches to his work included here.

Creating Your Own Space

Creating Your Own Space PDF

Author: María Davis

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 1793615365

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The relationship between women and houses has always been complex. Many influential writers have used the space of the house to portray women's conflicts with the society of their time. On the one hand, houses can represent a place of physical, psychological and moral restrictions, and on the other, they often serve as a metaphor for economic freedom and social acceptance. This usage is particularly pronounced in works written in the nineteenth and twentieth century, when restrictions on women's roles were changing: "anxieties about space sometimes seem to dominate the literature of both nineteenth-century women and their twentieth-century descendants." The Metaphor of the House in Feminist Literature uses a feminist literary criticism approach in order to examine the use of the house as metaphor in nineteenth and twentieth century literature.

Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement

Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement PDF

Author: Jody Cardinal

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1498582915

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Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement explores the role of social and political engagement by women writers in the development of American modernism. Examining a diverse array of genres by both canonical modernists and underrepresented writers, this collection uncovers an obscured strain of modernist activism. Each chapter provides a detailed cultural and literary analysis, revealing the ways in which modernists’ politically and socially engaged interventions shaped their writing. Considering issues such as working class women’s advocacy, educational reform, political radicalism, and the global implications for American literary production, this book examines the complexity of the relationship between creating art and fostering social change. Ultimately, this collection redefines the parameters of modernism while also broadening the conception of social engagement to include both readily acknowledged social movements as well as less recognizable forms of advocacy for social change.

The Philosophy of the Novel

The Philosophy of the Novel PDF

Author: J. M. Bernstein

Publisher: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780816613076

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Lukács's Theory of the novel has long been a key work in the philosophy but not the sociology of literature. J.M. Bernstein shows that Theory of the Novel must be seen in conjunction with History and Class Consciousness as a major contribution to a Marxist hermeneutics. He ties the philosophy of Lukács to Kant, Hegel, and Marx and contends that the categories structuring the novel are the central concepts of Kant's philosophy and that, therefore, the novel is marked by the same antinomies that infect Kant's system. Bernstein offers a concise account of dialectical theory and a telling analysis of Western (Hegelian) Marxism. He concludes with a critique of contemporary literary and critical practices, practices which only reinforce the antimonies already present in the novel. --From cover.