Announcing a New UNC Press Omnibus E-Book:
Alan M. Wald’s American Literary Left Trilogy: Includes American Night, Trinity of Passion, and Exiles from a Future Time
Now with the availability of a new Omnibus E-Book, you can download Alan Wald’s landmark trilogy of left literary history in a single click.
Included in this Omnibus E-Book:
In Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left, Wald offers a comprehensive history and reconsideration of the U.S. literary left in the mid-twentieth century. Recovering the central role Marxist-influenced writers played in fiction, poetry, theater, and literary criticism, he explores the lives and work of figures including Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Mike Gold, Claude McKay, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur.
The second of three volumes by Wald that track the political and personal lives of several generations of U.S. left-wing writers, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade carries forward the chronicle launched in Exiles from a Future Time. In this volume Wald delves into literary, emotional, and ideological trajectories of radical cultural workers in the era when the International Brigades fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the United States battled in World War II (1941-45). Confronting questions about Jewish masculinity, racism at the core of liberal democracy, the corrosion of utopian dreams, and the thorny interaction between antifascism and Communism, Wald re-creates the intellectual and cultural landscape of a remarkable era.
American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War, the final volume of this unprecedented trilogy, brings Alan Wald’s multigenerational history of Communist writers to a poignant climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, Wald reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The resulting literature, Wald shows, is a haunting record of fracture and struggle linked by common structures of feeling, ones more suggestive of the “negative dialectics” of Theodor Adorno than the traditional social realism of the Left.
Alan M. Wald is the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan and is the recipient of the Mary C. Turpie Prize of the American Studies Association.
ISBN 9781469608686, $60.00
Available for Amazon Kindle and B&N Nook
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