The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century

by Michael Denning

Overview

The Cultural Front charts the extraordinary upsurge of cultural activity and theory in America that began during the Great Depression and embraced Disney animators and proletarian novelists alike, alongside Orson Welles, Duke Ellington, John Dos Passos, C. L. R James and Billie Holiday. Spawned by the Popular Front of the Communist Party, it grew to encompass virtually every aspect of high and popular art in the US, instigating one of the most culturally rich and exciting periods in American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781844674640
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	01/04/2011
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	616
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Michael Denning teaches American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Mechanic Accents, Cover Stories, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, and The Cultural Front.

Editorial Reviews

A truly wonderful piece of history.”—The Progressive

“As fresh a synthesis of the distinctive culture of the 1930s and 1940s as you are likely to find anywhere.”—Times Literary Supplement

“An immense achievement ... the most important book yet written on American culture in the age of the CIO.”—Journal of American History

From the Publisher

An immense achievement … the most important book yet written on American culture in the age of the CIO.

Journal of American History

As fresh a synthesis of the distinctive culture of the 1930s and 1940s as you are likely to find anywhere.

Times Literary Supplement

A truly wonderful piece of history.

The Progressive

Denning appears to have read, heard and seen it all.

Adam Shatz - The Nation

In his introduction, Denning quotes Sean Wilentz's pronouncement: "To this day, when I hear the words Pop Front I think of atrocious art." But were art and literature from the 1930s really that bad or that unimportant to the development of American culture? Looking back at this much neglected period in American art and letters, the author, a professor of American studies at Yale, bucks received academic opinion and cogently argues that Popular Front artistsDplaywrights, novelists, painters, songwriters and singersDaffected American culture far more than is generally acknowledged. The answers to Denning's central questions of "What is the laboring of American culture? What does it mean to labor a culture?" are complex and intricate. Despite its clear prose, this volume is not for beginners in labor history or cultural theory. The depth of archival research in the volume is profound, and Denning freely cites such cultural theorists as Antonio Gramsci, Frederic Jameson, Raymond Williams and Kenneth Burke to explain the "laboring of American culture." Most important, however, is Denning's valuable attempt to rethink labor history in more constructive terms. Instead of joining in the academic mudslinging over which artists were Communists, fellow-travelers or neither, he broadens the significance of the 1930s by asking not who was what or who did what but what was the cumulative affect of these artists' artworksDfrom John Steinbeck's and John Dos Passos's novels to Billie Holiday's and Josh White's blues songsDon post-1930s culture. For this reason alone, this volume represents a significant departure from most popular histories of the Depression and its artists. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The American Thirties was a period of fertile political coalitions that drew largely from grass-roots labor and Civil Rights activism to give New Deal liberalism its left-wing content and orientation. Denning (American studies, Yale) is ostensibly concerned here with an examination of the cultural counterpart to that American popular front. The breadth of his study is stunning, ranging from the compositional innovations of Duke Ellington and blues popularizations of Josh White to the Marxist critical theorizing of Kenneth Burke, from Orson Welles's Shakespeare adaptations to Tillie Olson's feminist-labor stories. But this is not a work of popular history in any sense; it is a model of currents in cultural studies. Denning has produced a work that will sit alongside Warren Susman's Culture as History (Pantheon, 1985) as the deepest contemplation of Depression-era popular (and high) culture. For scholars and cultural studies enthusiasts.-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.

Library Journal