Download e-book for iPad: History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American by John Lowney

during this nuanced revisionist historical past of contemporary American poetry, John Lowney investigates the melancholy era’s effect on past due modernist American poetry from the socioeconomic situation of the Nineteen Thirties throughout the emergence of the recent social events of the Sixties. educated through an ongoing scholarly reconsideration of Thirties American tradition and targeting Left writers whose ancient recognition was once profoundly formed through the melancholy, global battle II, and the chilly warfare, Lowney articulates the Left’s demanding situations to nationwide collective reminiscence and redefines the significance of past due modernism in American literary background. The past due modernist writers Lowney reviews so much closely---Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thomas McGrath, and George Oppen---are now not all in most cases linked to the Thirties, nor are they in most cases obvious as literary friends. through reading those past due modernist writers relatively, Lowney foregrounds adjustments of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and social type and area whereas emphasizing how each one author constructed poetic kinds that answered to the cultural politics and socioaesthetic debates of the Nineteen Thirties. In so doing he calls into query the bounds that experience constrained the scholarly discussion approximately glossy poetry.No different examine of yank poetry has thought of the actual amassing of careers that Lowney considers. As poets whose collective historic awareness used to be profoundly formed by means of the turmoil of the melancholy and conflict years and the chilly War’s repression or rewriting of background, their varied skills characterize a unique generational influence on U.S. and overseas literary history.