Culture and crisis: Radical writers and writing in the 1930s

This revisionist study of American culture and politics in the 1930s examines the shifting definitions and relations of culture amidst the economic and social crisis of the Depression era. In the decade's popular fiction, advertising, travel writing, political discourses, and literature, the desire to represent social difference--particularly class difference--produces a consistently contradictory and unstable cultural terrain. More particularly, this desire subverts established modes of cultural representation by exposing the repressed social relations that underpin the universal claims of culture, high and low. From the rhetoric of labor giant, John L. Lewis, to proletarian fiction by writers like Jack Conroy and Josephine Herbst, the dilemma at the heart of the decade's cultural work revolves around the difficulties of communicating human experience across social boundaries of status and class.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio