Global Literary Radicalisms: The Making of a Red World Literature, 1917-1939
The Researchers
Dr. Myka Tucker-AbramsonLink opens in a new window and Professor Michael NiblettLink opens in a new window, from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies.
The Challenge
This project examines the unprecedented worldwide explosion of proletarian writing in the period 1917-1939. This writing constituted a self-consciously international network of revolutionary literature. While marginalized and misunderstood today, the globe-spanning new aesthetic forms and artistic groupings of the proletarian literary moment fundamentally shaped postcolonial politics and literatures in the post-WWII period. Engaging with multiple literary traditions, languages, and geopolitical contexts, this project recovers and re-reads global proletarian writing from the interwar period to reveal its diverse, experimental qualities, as well as its importance to understanding pressing issues today around exploitation, racism, sexism, fascism, and ecology.
Our Approach
We aim 1) to show how, in the period 1917-1939, global proletarian writing sought to transform received literary forms to capture working-class experience; 2) to analyse how this writing, which contra the clich茅 of formulaic, staid didacticism was typically experimental, avant-gardist, and generically diverse, allows us to re-write canonical histories of modernism and (socialist) realism; 3) to explore the international circulation of narrative forms, themes, styles, and tropes, and to uncover the connections between different national proletarian literary movements; 4) to examine how this proletarian literature functioned as a vehicle for a revolutionary internationalist politics that sought to construct new united fronts against labour exploitation, colonialism and imperialism, racism, fascism, and sexism; 5) to explore the afterlives of the interwar proletarian literary moment, highlighting how the literary and political internationalisms of the period persisted into the post-WWII era.
Our Impact
The project鈥檚 recovery and re-reading of a marginalized and misunderstood global literary corpus seeks to advance the fields of comparative and world literature, postcolonial studies, and various forms of 鈥榓rea鈥� studies (from American Studies to Slavic Studies to East Asian Studies).
