The Hunted Revolutionaries

ISBN-13: 9783639130553 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 188 str.

Ian Peddie

Opis

Taking its title from a Thomas McGrath poem, TheHunted Revolutionaries argues that as the pressure onUS left-wing writers grew in the wake of increasingdisenchantment with communism at theend of the 1930s, so writers developed more nuancedforms of resistance that reflected the centralimportance of race and ethnicity in American society.While challenging the notion that left-wing writingwas formulaic and propagandistic, this study alsocomplicates the idea of a monolithic left, suggestinginstead that there were many lefts in existence andattempts to impose unitary views on writers wereas futile as explications that dismissed left-wingwriting as party-directed articles of faith. Usingthe writing of Nelson Algren, Thomas McGrath, andLangston Hughes, this book connects their work to thelived experiences they chronicled, from the headydays of the 1930s through McCarthyism to the nuclearage and beyond. In so doing, it provides aninnovative approach to left-wing writing, one thatallows readers to better understand how the sense ofhumanism that inspired these writers was borne of anassurance that class matters.

O autorze

Dr Ian Peddie holds a PhD in literature (University of Rochester)
and has taught at the University of Sydney, West Texas A&M
University and the University of Rochester. He has published
numerous articles on subjects such as American literature and
culture, popular music, and literary radicalism, in addition to
interviews with a number of authors.