Literature, amusement, and technology in the Great Depression
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Literature, amusement, and technology in the Great Depression
（Cambridge studies in American literature and culture, [131]）
Cambridge University Press, 2009, c2002
- : pbk
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Note
"First published 1997. This digitally printed version 2009"--T.p. verso
"Paperback re-issue"--Back cover
Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-265) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Literature, Amusement and Technology examines the exchange between literature and recreational practices in 1930s America. William Solomon argues that autobiographical writers like Edward Dahlberg and Henry Miller took aesthetic inspiration from urban manifestations of the carnival spirit: Coney Island amusement parks, burlesque, vaudeville, and the dime museum display of human oddities. More broadly, he demonstrates that the literary projects of the period pivoted around images of grotesquely disfigured bodies which appeared as part of this recreational culture. Figures of corporeal fragmentation also proved important to novelists such as Nathanael West and John Dos Passos who were concerned to resist the ideological force of spectacular forms of mass entertainment like the World's Fairs, Hollywood film and military ceremonies. Psychic, social, aesthetic and political tensions were thus managed in Depression-era American literature in relation to communal modes of play. This study will appeal to scholars of twentieth-century American literature and culture.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: disfigurations
- 1. Disinterring Edward Dahlberg
- 2. Laughter and depression: Henry Miller and the emergence of the technocarnivalesque
- Intermission: vulgar Marxism
- 3. Fascism and fragmentation in Nathanael West
- 4. Militarism and mutilation in John Dos Passos
- Postface: discharges
- Notes
- Index.
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