This study examines the exchange between literature and recreational practices in 1930s America. William Solomon argues that autobiographical writers like Edward Dahlberg and Henry Miller derived aesthetic inspiration from urban manifestations of the carnival spirit: Coney Island amusement parks, burlesque, vaudeville, and the dime museum display of human oddities. More broadly, he demonstrates that the literary projects of the period pivoted around images of grotesquely disfigured bodies which appeared as part of this recreational culture.

This study examines the exchange between literature and recreational practices in 1930s America. William Solomon argues that autobiographical writers like Edward Dahlberg and Henry Miller derived aesthetic inspiration from urban manifestations of the carnival spirit: Coney Island amusement parks, burlesque, vaudeville, and the dime museum display of human oddities. More broadly, he demonstrates that the literary projects of the period pivoted around images of grotesquely disfigured bodies which appeared as part of this recreational culture.

Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls and nyuk-nyuks percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music. William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism --a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on a harum-scarum intellectual odyssey from high modernism to...

This book offers a timely introduction to the intersection of radical politics and American literature in the period of the Great Depression.

This book offers a timely introduction to the intersection of radical politics and American literature in the period of the Great Depression.