No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Scholarship about Depression-era proletarian literature has had to adapt itself to new political and social realities since 1984. With the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, literary analyses of texts written in the atmosphere of the Communist-led cultural movement may seem to lose currency; to argue for the relevancy at the close of the 20th century may seem irrelevant to postmodern aesthetics. Likewise, as Barbara Foley suggests, reading proletarian texts with their self-conscious critiques of class struggle and their formulaic and didactic plots offers little to audiences who are used to postmodern experimentation and “confessional” poetics (viii).