Leftist liberators: American literary criticism in the thirties

Abstract

In Unusable Past (1986) Russell Reising has recently offered his establishment of a canon of critics. 1 The book argues for an understanding of American Literature as "a reflection of American society" and for a literary criticism that is "striving for a more social or cultural appreciation of American literature" by taking "a rigorous social approach" (Reising 218). Reising tries to make his readers believe that social and Marxist criticism is a product of the nineteen—eighties and shows himself largely uninformed of the origins of the kind of criticism from the Left that he advocates: while he does give two brief mentions to Granville Hicks, names like V. F. Calverton and Michael Gold do not appear in his account.