UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Radical Culture in Depression America

Book Jacket: "Rousing the Nation" by L. Browder

Laura Browder

A reevaluation of American cultural politics in the 1930s

This interdisciplinary study blends textual analysis with social history to chart the intellectual and artistic ferment of Depression-era America. In Rousing the Nation, Laura Browder explores the fiction, drama, and film produced during the decade by socially conscious intellectuals who struggled to create a uniquely American art. Challenged by a public more exposed to comic strips and tabloids than to serious artistic creativity, these writers and cinematographers used the techniques of modernism and muckraking to fashion works that would be experimental without being insular and would inspire the public to social activism.

Browder first considers authors James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos, arguing that their work successfully sparked a discussion about what it meant to be American at a time when the country's very future seemed in doubt. She then examines the Living Newspaper productions of the Federal Theatre Project, which brought politically and aesthetically provocative drama to twenty-five million Americans. In a final chapter, she examines social films of the period, focusing on Paramount's 1939 production of One-Third of a Nation.

"What makes Browder's book so much more compelling than other work on 1930s literature is the sheer range of expertise (literature, autobiography, politics, theater, and film) and critical acumen. In a field given to jargon and ideological posturing, her prose is lucid, free from cant, and wryly articulate."

Thomas Doherty, Brandeis University

Laura Browder is assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.

American Studies
240 pp., 10 illustrations
LC 97-33358
$40.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-125-2
1998

about placing orders on our secure server
ADD TO CART | VIEW CART | CHECKOUT