Better Red The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur [Hardcover]

Better Redis an interdisciplinary study addressing the complicated intersection of American feminism and the political left as refracted in Tillie Olsen's and Meridel Le Sueur's lives and literary texts. The first book-length study to explore these feminist writers' ties to the American Communist Party, it contributes to a reenvisioning of 1930s U.S. Communism as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis. At once loyal members of the male-dominated Communist party and emerging feminists, Olsen and Le Sueur exhibit in their writing tendencies both toward and away from Party tenets and attitudes--at points subverting formalist as well as orthodox Marxist literary categories. By producing working-class discourse, Olsen and Le Sueur challenge the bourgeois assumptions--often masked as classless and universal--of much canonical literature; and by creating working-classwomen'swriting, they problematize the patriarchal nature of the Left and the masculinist assumptions of much proletarian literature, anticipating the concerns of second wave feminists a generation later.

Olsen and Le Sueur have not faltered in their determination to raise the voice of working class women. Nor have they ceased to encourage, work for, anticipate a just world.Better Redis a meticulous scrutiny of two exceedingly important creative and political lives. --Alice Walker

Better Redis a great read a dense, fact-filled, lively book about two women writers who were active Communist Party members and who, out of a deep understanding of working women's lives, wrote against the often bossy, misogynist grain of the Party line. Many know Olsen and Le Sueur as feminists, but this is the first book I've read that tells us about these writers' involvement in the Communist movement. Like Olsen and Le Sueur, Coiner has not been afraid of the word 'Communist'. --Grace Paley.

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