American night : the literary left in the era of the Cold War /
Alan M. Wald.
- Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, (c)2012.
- 1 online resource (433 pages)
Includes bibliographies and index.
Cover; Contents; Preface; INTRODUCTION: Late Antifascism; CHAPTER ONE: Postwar; The Culture Wars of Kenneth Fearing; The Mask of Irony; Rage against the Machine; Study in Fundamentals; The Virtue of Intentions; CHAPTER TWO: Scenes from a Class Struggle; Somewhere beyond Proletarianism; The Intellectual under Fire; The Making of Zhdanovists; Grand Illusions; Humboldt's Gift; CHAPTER THREE: The Cult of Reason; Coming Home; After the Popular Front; The Sublime Saxton; The Ruins of Memory; Gender and the Crisis of Form; CHAPTER FOUR: The "Homintern" Reconsidered; Butterfly Friends. The Closeted PastThe Double Life of Harry Dana; Tough Guys; Mama's Boys; CHAPTER FIVE: Lonely Crusaders, Part I; The Great Outsider; "I Tried to Be a Communist"; Personal History; American Pages; The Radical Stranger; CHAPTER SIX: Lonely Crusaders, Part II; Melville in Old Saybrook; Contingencies of Gender; The Fog; The Etiology of Mourning; Red, Black, and Gay; Exile and Its Discontents; CHAPTER SEVEN: Jews without Judaism; Deconversion and Disavowal; Friends of the Unconscious; Analytical Realism; The Book of Memory; A Novel of Emotions; CHAPTER EIGHT: Off Modernity's Grid. The Strange Career of People's PoetryImaginary Friends; Memories of the Future; Socialist Surrealism; Auden in Brooklyn; CONCLUSION: The Sense of an Ending; The Afterlife of Literary Communism; The Indeterminacy of Art; The Presence of an Absence; A Note on Methodology; Notes; Acknowledgments; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z.
American Night, the final volume of an unprecedented trilogy, brings Alan Wald's multigenerational history of Communist writers to a poignant climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, Wald reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The resulting literature, Wald shows, is a haunting record of fracture and struggle linked by common structures of feeling, ones more suggestive of the.
9780807837344 9781469601502
American literature--History and criticism.--20th century Communism and literature--History--United States--20th century. Socialism and literature--History--United States--20th century. Right and left (Political science) in literature.