Date of Award
1-1-2020
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College/School/Department
Department of English
Content Description
1 online resource (vi, 150 pages)
Dissertation/Thesis Chair
Paul Stasi
Committee Members
Bret Benjamin, Derik Smith
Keywords
Marxist criticism, Modernism (Literature), Naturalism (Literature), Popular Front, Proletarian Literature, Naturalism in literature, American fiction, Working class authors, Proletariat in literature, Communist aesthetics
Subject Categories
American Literature | American Studies | United States History
Abstract
This dissertation explores three proletarian novels published at the end of the Depression era—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—in light of how their aesthetics complicates the inherited epistemology of literary naturalism in response to the changing political climates in the age of the Popular Front. Calling these texts “proletarian modernism,” I investigate how their aesthetics mediate the relations among Marxist ideas, political solidarity and the American value of individualism in an age when it became gradually difficult to fundamentally criticize capitalism and liberalism.
Recommended Citation
Kihara, Kenji, "Proletarian modernism : aesthetic intervention in naturalist epistemology in Steinbeck, Wright and McCullers" (2020). Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024). 2492.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/legacy-etd/2492