Culture and crisis: Radical writers and writing in the 1930s
Hanley, Lawrence Francis
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/22127
Description
Title
Culture and crisis: Radical writers and writing in the 1930s
Author(s)
Hanley, Lawrence Francis
Issue Date
1994
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Nelson, Cary
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
American Studies
History, United States
Literature, American
Language
eng
Abstract
This revisionist study of American culture and politics in the 1930s examines the shifting definitions and relations of culture amidst the economic and social crisis of the Depression era. In the decade's popular fiction, advertising, travel writing, political discourses, and literature, the desire to represent social difference--particularly class difference--produces a consistently contradictory and unstable cultural terrain. More particularly, this desire subverts established modes of cultural representation by exposing the repressed social relations that underpin the universal claims of culture, high and low. From the rhetoric of labor giant, John L. Lewis, to proletarian fiction by writers like Jack Conroy and Josephine Herbst, the dilemma at the heart of the decade's cultural work revolves around the difficulties of communicating human experience across social boundaries of status and class.
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