The cultural front : the laboring of American culture in the twentieth-century

Author / Creator

Denning, Michael

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Summary

"A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a mural of the extraordinary upsurge which reshaped American modernism and mass culture in the middle decades of the 20th century...

"A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a mural of the extraordinary upsurge which reshaped American modernism and mass culture in the middle decades of the 20th century. Born as a proletarian avant-garde in the wake of the General Strikes of 1934, the cultural front came of age in the labor movement, the New Deal arts projects, and the film, radio and recording studios. Its successes provoked a cultural civil war, as mid-century America was dominated by Congressional investigations, Hollywood blacklists, and the red scare." "Beginning with a historical overview of the Popular Front social movement, and of the rise of the modern cultural apparatus, Michael Denning reconsiders the work and politics of two generations of artists, writers and intellectualscelebrated figures like Welles, Holiday, Ellington, John Dos Passos, Woody Guthrie, Tillie Olsen and Richard Wright as well as lesser-known figures like fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, Japanese emigre feminist Haru Matsui, bricklayer novelist Pietro di Donato, and blues singer Josh White - and illuminates their social consciousness and political unconscious, as they struggled to create a genuinely democratic popular culture."--BOOK JACKET.

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