Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur

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Oxford University Press, 1995 - Literary Criticism - 282 pages
Better Red is an interdisciplinary study addressing the complicated intersection of American feminism and the political left as refracted in Tillie Olsen's and Meridel Le Sueur's lives and literary texts. The first book-length study to explore these feminist writers' ties to the American Communist Party, it contributes to a reenvisioning of 1930s U.S. Communism as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis. At once loyal members of the male-dominated Communist party and emerging feminists, Olsen and Le Sueur exhibit in their writing tendencies both toward and away from Party tenets and attitudes--at points subverting formalist as well as orthodox Marxist literary categories. By producing working-class discourse, Olsen and Le Sueur challenge the bourgeois assumptions--often masked as classless and universal--of much canonical literature; and by creating working-class women's writing, they problematize the patriarchal nature of the Left and the masculinist assumptions of much proletarian literature, anticipating the concerns of "second wave" feminists a generation later.
 

Contents

Introduction
3
The Thirties Literary Left
15
Scratch a Communist Women and the American Communist Party During the Depression
39
Meridel Le Sueur Biographical Sketch and Reportage
72
Le Sueurs The Girl Our Fathers Annunciation and Corn Village
108
Biographical Sketch and Thirties Publications
141
Olsens Yonnondio From the Thirties
174
Literature as No Ones Private Ground Olsens Tell Me a Riddle and Silences
192
Conclusion
226
Notes
241
Works Cited
261
Index
275
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About the author (1995)

Constance Coiner is at State University of New York at Binghamton.

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