NEW AND UPDATED EDITION:
THE CULTURAL FRONT: THE LABORING OF AMERICAN CULTURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
BY MICHAEL DENNING
PUBLISHED: 6 MARCH 2011
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“An immense achievement...The most important book yet written on American culture in the age of the CIO.” – Michael Rogin, JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY
“Denning's central claim…is indisputable: "the people" themselves became an object of admiration, a cultural icon, during the 1930s. They were truly everywhere.” – Kevin Mattson, DISSENT
“An Extraordinary book…it offers to turn upside down our most dearly held understandings about how American culture has evolved.” – Van Gosse, AMERICAN QUARTERLY
“As fresh a synthesis of the distinctive culture of the 1930s and 1940s as you are likely to find anywhere.” –TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
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Hugely influential since its original publication in 1997, and now released in a new edition with an afterward, THE CULTURAL FRONT charts the extraordinary upsurge of cultural activity and theory in American that began during the Great Depression and embraced Disney animators and proletarian novelists alike. As garment workers, longshoremen, sharecroppers and clerks took to the streets, striking and organizing unions in the midst of the 1930s, artists, writers and filmmakers joined this insurgent social movement by creating a cultural front. Spawned by the Popular Front social movement, it grew to encompass virtually every aspect of high and popular art in the US, instigating one of the most culturally rich and exciting periods in American history.
Michael Denning’s book details the ways in which well-known figures such as Orson Welles, Duke Ellington, John Dos Passos and Billie Holiday, as well as a panoply of lesser known cultural leftists, walked picket lines, waged a “literary class war”, and produced anti-fascist adaptations of Shakespeare, amongst other activities, fusing their cultural and political practices and allowing each to inform the other. Thoroughly permeated by a radically popular and oppositional mentality, the cultural front informed one of the most culturally exciting and rich periods in American history — a veritable “Second American Renaissance.” As Denning argues in his conclusion, this was a vital moment in the development of U.S. culture, providing as it did the grounds for the countercultural upsurge of the 1960s New Left.
Denning’s original and interdisciplinary approach – drawing from the work of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson as well as a vast amount of meticulously documented research into Depression-era U.S. culture and society – makes The Cultural Front valuable to both experts and novices in the field.
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AUTHOR: MICHAEL DENNING is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His previous books include MECHANIC ACCENTS, COVER STORIES and CULTURE IN THE AGE OF THREE WORLDS.
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ISBN: 978-1-84467-464-0 / $29.95 / £20.00 / $37.50 / Paperback / 600 pages + 16 page plate selection
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