Comrades and critics : women, literature and the Left in 1930s Canada / / Candida Rifkind

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910781122003321
• Autore: Rifkind Candida <1972->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Toronto, [Ontario] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2009; ©2009
• ISBN: 1-4426-9163-8; 1-4426-8770-3
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (279 p.)
• Disciplina: 810.90054
• Soggetti: Canadian literature - 20th century - History and criticism; Women authors, Canadian - 20th century - Political and social views; Socialism and literature - Canada - History - 20th century; Right and left (Political science) in literature; Modernism (Literature) - Canada; Nineteen thirties; History; Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Electronic books.; Canada
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: The Socialist-Modernist Encounter -- Women, Modernism, and Socialism -- Dialectics of Scarcity and Abundance -- The Literary Left and the Field of Cultural Production -- 1 Revolution, Gender, and Third Period Modernism -- Dorothy Livesay and the Third Period -- Communist Periodicals and Counterpublics -- The Revolutionary Chorus -- The Social Work of Documentary Poetry -- 2 The Poet, the Public, and Popular Front Modernism -- The Dustbowl and the Spanish Civil War -- Popular Front Periodicals and Poetics -- Anne Marriott's The Wind Our Enemy: A Modernist Poem -- Anne Marriott's The Wind Our Enemy: A ; Popular Front Poem -- 3 Leftist Theatre and the Performance of Gender -- The Socialist Stage and Amateur Theatre -- Reconstructing Leftist Performances -- Women and the Communist Stage -- The Comradely Ideal and Social Democratic Drama -- 4 The Novel and Documentary Modernism -- Irene Baird's Waste Heritage and Mass Unemployment -- Documentary Modernism -- Radical Manhood in Waste Heritage -- Writing Women, Reading Men -- Conclusion: New Formations-the Second World War and Beyond.
• Sommario/riassunto: While Canadian historians have studied socialism in the 1930s, and although there have been many studies of American and British literary leftists from this period, Comrades and Critics is the first full-length study of Canada's 1930s literary left. Challenging dominant perceptions that this decade was a lull between the more celebrated modernist enterprises of the 1920s and 1940s, Candida Rifkind argues that the events of the 1930s - from mass unemployment, to the dustbowl, to the Spanish Civil War - galvanized a generation of writers, leading them to unite artistic practice and political action in provocative and influential ways. Analyzing and recovering much-neglected poems, plays, manifestoes, and documentaries, Rifkind demonstrates how leftist cultural production came to dominate English-Canadian literature by the end of the decade. She pays particular attention to the significant role that women writers played in this period and examines a diverse group of writers that included Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird, and Toby Gordon Ryan. These writers negotiated the struggle to revolutionize both literature and politics, while being subject to the gender hierarchies of socialism and literary modernism that continued long after the thirties came to an end. A groundbreaking study in Canadian history and literature, Comrades and Critics is a much-needed examination of an important and still influential literary period.