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      Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature
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      Book

      Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature

      DOI link for Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature

      Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature book

      The Country Poor in the Great Depression

      Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature

      DOI link for Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature

      Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature book

      The Country Poor in the Great Depression
      ByStephen Fender
      Edition 1st Edition
      First Published 2011
      eBook Published 22 August 2011
      Pub. Location New York
      Imprint Routledge
      DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203803226
      Pages 244
      eBook ISBN 9780203803226
      Subjects Area Studies, Humanities, Language & Literature
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      Fender, S. (2011). Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature: The Country Poor in the Great Depression (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203803226

      ABSTRACT

      Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economic crisis in the nation’s cities and factories. Over eighty years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic images of country poor whites – in the novels of John Steinbeck, the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers’ life histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project.

      Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New Deal’s radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to undermine their condition.

      How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and around the country Depression, and the myths on which they drew.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      chapter |9 pages

      Introduction: Pessimistic Progressives

      part |1 pages

      Part I: Climate: The Myth of the Dust Bowl

      chapter 1|19 pages

      Nature and Apocalypse: Okies and the New Deal in California

      chapter 2|13 pages

      A Tale of Two Camps

      chapter 3|17 pages

      Matter out of Place

      chapter 4|19 pages

      Who Stole the Folk’s Music?

      part |1 pages

      Part II: Geography: Social Stasis in the Southern Life Histories

      chapter 5|19 pages

      The WPA and the Southern Country Poor: Life Histories or

      chapter 6|22 pages

      The Southern Life Histories: The Class Factor

      chapter |1 pages

      Part III: Madonnas and Christ Figures

      chapter 7|30 pages

      The Dust Bowl on Film

      chapter 8|22 pages

      Nature and Naturalism in Steinbeck’s Labor Fiction

      chapter |19 pages

      Conclusion: Erosion and Retrieval: Poor White Identity and the Limits of Literature

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