Repression, Recovery, Renewal: The Politics of Expanding the CanonRepression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945. Cary Nelson

Abstract

As recently as 1980 there was relatively little critical or scholarly work available on the literature produced by the American Left from before World War I through the aftermath of World War II. Aside from the standard accounts by Walter B. Rideout, Daniel Aaron, James Gilbert, and Richard Pells, and the shorter work of David Madden and William Empson, there was little else that broke with postwar and New Critical paradigms to suggest that the corpus of radical literature deserved anything other than the usual disregard.1 Indeed the fact that most continue to refer to this literature as proletarian literature, a narrow category originally urged by doctrinaire Communist Party critics of the late twenties, testifies to the persistent unfamiliarity with the literature's actual diversity. Fortunately, the recent appearance of numerous important biographies and scholarly studies pertaining to the subject makes the older category seem increasingly anachronistic.2