The essays, as a group, constitute a reevaluation of the American literature of the 1930s. At the same time they support and reinforce certain assumptions about the decade of the Great Depressionthat it was grim, desperate, a time when dreams died and poverty became something other than genteelthey challenge other assumptions, chief among them in the notion that 1930s literature was uniform in content, drab in style, anti-formalist, and always political or sociological in nature. They leave us with an impression that there was variety in American writing of the 1930s and a convincing argument that the decade was not a retreat from the modernism of the 1920s. Rather it was a transitional period in which literary modernism was very much an issue and a force that bore imaginative fruit.
The essays, as a group, constitute a reevaluation of the American literature of the 1930s. At the same time they support and reinforce certain assumptions about the decade of the Great Depressionthat it was grim, desperate, a time when dreams died and poverty became something other than genteelthey challenge other assumptions, chief among them in the notion that 1930s literature was uniform in content, drab in style, anti-formalist, and always political or sociological in nature. They leave us with an impression that there was variety in American writing of the 1930s and a convincing argument that the decade was not a retreat from the modernism of the 1920s. Rather it was a transitional period in which literary modernism was very much an issue and a force that bore imaginative fruit.
![Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s](http://vs-images.bn-web.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s
248![Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s](http://vs-images.bn-web.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s
248Paperback
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780817300791 |
---|---|
Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
Publication date: | 06/30/1982 |
Pages: | 248 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |