The cultural front : the laboring of American culture in the Twentieth Century / Michael Denning.
1996
E169 .D425 1997 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection
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Details
Title
The cultural front : the laboring of American culture in the Twentieth Century / Michael Denning.
Author
Denning, Michael.
ISBN
185984815X
9781859848159
9781859848159
Imprint
London ; New York : Verso, 1996.
Language
English
Description
xx, 556 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
Call Number
E169 .D425 1997
Summary
"A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a mural of the extraordinary upsurge which reshaped American modernism and mass culture in the middle decades of the 20th century. Born as a proletarian avant-garde in the wake of the General Strikes of 1934, the cultural front came of age in the labor movement, the New Deal arts projects, and the film, radio and recording studios. Its successes provoked a cultural civil war, as mid-century America was dominated by Congressional investigations, Hollywood blacklists, and the red scare." "Beginning with a historical overview of the Popular Front social movement, and of the rise of the modern cultural apparatus, Michael Denning reconsiders the work and politics of two generations of artists, writers and intellectualscelebrated figures like Welles, Holiday, Ellington, John Dos Passos, Woody Guthrie, Tillie Olsen and Richard Wright as well as lesser-known figures like fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, Japanese emigre feminist Haru Matsui, bricklayer novelist Pietro di Donato, and blues singer Josh White - and illuminates their social consciousness and political unconscious, as they struggled to create a genuinely democratic popular culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 473-543) and index.
Series
Haymarket series.
Record Appears in
On-Campus Resources > Books
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Table of Contents
Waiting for lefty
Marching on May Day : cultural politics
Ballads for Americans : aesthetic ideologies
The decline and fall of the Lincoln republic : Dos Passos's U.S.A.
"The literary class war" : rethinking proletarian literature
"The tenement thinking" : ghetto pastorals
Grapes of wrath : "the art and science of migratin'"
Labor on revue : the popular front musical theater
Cabaret blues
The politics of magic : Orson Welles's allegories of anti-fascism
"Who's afraid of big bad Walt?" : Disney's radical cartoonists
American culture and socialist theory
Conclusion : the old left : eleven outlined epitaphs.
Marching on May Day : cultural politics
Ballads for Americans : aesthetic ideologies
The decline and fall of the Lincoln republic : Dos Passos's U.S.A.
"The literary class war" : rethinking proletarian literature
"The tenement thinking" : ghetto pastorals
Grapes of wrath : "the art and science of migratin'"
Labor on revue : the popular front musical theater
Cabaret blues
The politics of magic : Orson Welles's allegories of anti-fascism
"Who's afraid of big bad Walt?" : Disney's radical cartoonists
American culture and socialist theory
Conclusion : the old left : eleven outlined epitaphs.