ABSTRACT
For the contemporary historian of literary theory and criticism in America perhaps what most distinguishes the decade of the 1930s is the formation of four significant groups: the Marxists, the New Critics, the Chicago Critics, and the New York Intellectuals. Needless to say, the histories of these schools lead backward to earlier times and forward to later years; and, too, the development of each movement links up with wider social forces and analogous groups in other places. While the emergence of heterogeneous and competing schools of criticism clearly calls for differentiated historical analyses, the field of economic, political, and intellectual forces of the 1930s serves as a common, however fragmented and complex, ground of development. The “Great Depression” nicknames the numerous socioeconomic phenomena and cultural problems that marked American history in the 1930s.
