Black & White & Noir explores America's pulp modernism through penetrating readings of the noir sensibility lurking in an eclectic array of media: Office of War Information photography, women's experimental films, and African-American novels, among others. It traces the dark edges of cultural detritus blowing across the postwar landscape, finding in pulp a political theory that helps explain America's fascination with lurid spectacles of crime. We are accustomed to thinking of noir as a film form popularized in movies like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and, more...
Black & White & Noir explores America's pulp modernism through penetrating readings of the noir sensibility lurking in an eclectic array of med...
This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared during the decade. She focuses on the ways in which sexuality and maternity reconstruct the "classic" proletarian novel to speak about both the working-class woman and the radical female intellectual.
Two well-known novels bracket this study: Agnes Smedley's Daughters...
This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals....
This comprehensive collection of fiction, poetry, and reportage by revolutionary women of the 1930s lays to rest the charge that feminism disappeared after 1920. Among the thirty-six writers are Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Tess Slesinger, Agnes Smedley, and Meridel Le Sueur. Other voices may be new to readers, including many working-class black and white women. The topics range from sexuality and family relationships to race, class, and patriarchy to party politics. Toni Morrison writes that the anthology is "peopled with questioning, caring, socially...
This comprehensive collection of fiction, poetry, and reportage by revolutionary women of the 1930s lays to rest the charge that feminism disappeared ...
This text examines documentary in print, photography and film from the 1930s to the present day, using the lens of recent feminist film theory as well as scholarship on race, class and gender. Rabinowitz discusses the ways in which the media have shaped the truth over the decades: in the 1930s, about poverty, labour and popular culture during the Depression; in the 1960s, about the Vietnam War, racism, work and the counterculture; and in the 1980s, abut feminist and gay critiques of gender, history, narrative and cinema.
This text examines documentary in print, photography and film from the 1930s to the present day, using the lens of recent feminist film theory as well...
The first in the four-part series Habits of Being, charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing as seen on the street and in museums, in films and literature, and in advertisements and magazines, this volume features a close-up focus on accessories--the shoe, the hat, the necklace--intimately connected to the body. These essays, most of which have appeared in the cutting-edge Italian series Abito e Identita, offer new theoretical and historical takes on the role of clothing, dress, and accessories in the construction of the modern subject. With...
The first in the four-part series Habits of Being, charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing as seen on the street an...
Clothing may not make the man (or woman), but it helps. How clothing as a vestige and artifact and as transmitter of identity moves from one use to another, from one fantasy to another fad, from one literary source to another visual one: these are the concerns of the essays in this volume.
The second in a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress, and accessories, Exchanging Clothes focuses on the concept of transnational "circulation and exchange"--not only the global exchange of material commodities across time and space but...
Clothing may not make the man (or woman), but it helps. How clothing as a vestige and artifact and as transmitter of identity moves from one use to...
In nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, fashion--once the province of the well-to-do--began to make its way across class lines. At once a democratizing influence and a means of maintaining distinctions, gaps in time remained between what the upper classes wore and what the lower classes later copied. And toward the end of the century, style also moved from the streets to the parlor. The third in a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress, and accessories, Fashioning the Nineteenth Century focuses on this...
In nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, fashion--once the province of the well-to-do--began to make its way across class lines. At ...
"There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."--a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951)
American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they brought modernism to Main Street, democratized literature and ideas, spurred social mobility, and helped readers fashion new identities. Drawing on extensive original research, Paula Rabinowitz unearths the far-reaching political, social, and aesthetic impact of the pulps between the late 1930s and early 1960s.
Published...
"There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."--a civic leader quoted in a New American Li...
This final volume in the four-volume series Habits of Being shows how the dialectic between everyday appearance and outrageous acts is mediated through clothing and accessories. It considers how clothing and accessories can move quickly from the ordinary to the extravagant. Employing many different approaches, these essays explore how wearing an object--a crown, a flower, an earring, a corsage, a veil, even a length of material--can stray beyond the bounds of the body on which it is placed into the discrepant territory of flagrantly excessive public signs of love, status, honor,...
This final volume in the four-volume series Habits of Being shows how the dialectic between everyday appearance and outrageous acts is media...
Red Love Across the Pacific examines the transnational movement that swept across the Asia-Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s as a combined form of political and sexual revolution for women and men, gay and straight, and follows its trajectory during the twentieth century. Red Love expressed a desire for a new society where love itself would be radically reconfigured. Examining film, literature, biography, and the censor's archive, this book analyzes the transnational trade in representation of new, radical, often working-class forms of desire as well as the institutions that emerged to suppress...
Red Love Across the Pacific examines the transnational movement that swept across the Asia-Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s as a combined form of politi...
