Comrades and critics

Description:

"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."--Jacket.

subjects: Authors, canadian,  Right and left (political science),  Modernism (literature),  Canadian literature, women authors,  Canadian literature, history and criticism,  Canadian literature,  History and criticism,  Canadian Women authors,  Political and social views,  Socialism and literature,  History,  Right and left (Political science) in literature,  Nineteen thirties,  Canadian Authors,  Women authors,  Canadian literature (English),  Écrivains canadiens,  Pensée politique et sociale,  Socialisme et littérature,  Histoire,  Gauche (Science politique) dans la littérature,  Modernisme (Littérature),  Écrits de femmes canadiens-anglais,  Histoire et critique,  Littérature canadienne-anglaise,  Années trente (Vingtième siècle)