Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 21 September 2023
- 05 October 2023
- ISBN:
- 9781009347808
- 9781009347839
- 9781009347785
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.51kg, 238 Pages
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.392kg, 240 Pages
You may already have access via personal or institutional login- Subjects:
- Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory
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Book description
Furnishing a novel take on the poetry of the 1930s within the context of the cultural history of the Depression, this book argues that the period's economic and cultural crisis was accompanied by an epistemological crisis in which cultural producers increasingly cast doubt on language in its ability to represent society. Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America pursues this guiding premise through six chapters, each framing the problem of the ongoing vitality of language as a social medium with respect to a particular poet: Louis Zukofsky and the commodification of language; Muriel Rukeyser and documentary photography; Charles Reznikoff and Depression-era historiography; Sterling A. Brown and the blues as both an ethnographic phenomenon and a marketable cultural product; Norman Macleod and Southwest regionalism; and Lorine Niedecker and ethnographic surrealism. The book closes by examining the shifting status of the poet as society transitioned from a focus on production to an emphasis on consumption in the Post-war period.
Awards
Winner, 2024 Book Prize, American Studies Network
Reviews
‘The highly detailed and illuminating close readings represent one of the book’s many strengths: to reconceive the role of close reading as a crucial component of holistic, interdisciplinary claims.’
Ruth Jennison Source: American Literary History
Contents
Contents
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