Cambridge University Press Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression: 131 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 131)

Product Description Literature, Amusement and Technology examines the exchange between literature and recreational practices in 1930s America. William Solomon argues that autobiographical writers like Edward Dahlberg and Henry Miller took aesthetic inspiration from urban manifestations of the carnival spirit: Coney Island amusement parks, burlesque, vaudeville, and the dime museum display of human oddities. More broadly, he demonstrates that the literary projects of the period pivoted around images of grotesquely disfigured bodies which appeared as part of this recreational culture. Figures of corporeal fragmentation also proved important to novelists such as Nathanael West and John Dos Passos who were concerned to resist the ideological force of spectacular forms of mass entertainment like the World's Fairs, Hollywood film and military ceremonies. Psychic, social, aesthetic and political tensions were thus managed in Depression-era American literature in relation to communal modes of play. This study will appeal to scholars of twentieth-century American literature and culture. Review "Along the way Soloman recuperates the reputation of an important writer (Dahlberg), offers an illuminating reading of Nelson Algren's novel Somebody in Boots, and meditates on the language of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Supplemented with extensive notes, this is a theoretically sophisticated and engagingly written analysis. Highly recommended." Choice Book Description This book examines the exchange between literature and recreational practices in 1930s America. About the Author William Solomon is Assistant Professor in the Departments of English and American Studies at Stanford University. He has published essays in American Literature, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, and Style. This is his first book.