The Social Life of Poetry Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism [Hardcover]

From Jewish publishers to Appalachian poets, Green s cultural study reveals the role of Mountain Whites in American racial history. Part One (1880-1935) explores the networks that created American pluralism, revealing Appalachia s essential role in shaping America s understanding of African Americans, Anglos, Jews, Southerners, and Immigrants. Drawing upon archival research and deft close readings of poems, Part Two (1934-1946) delves into the inner-workings of literary history and shows how diverse alliances used four books of poetry about Appalachia to change America s notion of race, region, and pluralism. Green starts with how Jesse Stuart and the Agrarians defended Southern whiteness, follows how James Still appealed to liberals, shows how Muriel Rukeyser put Appalachia at the center of anti-fascism, and ends with how Don West and the Progressives struggled to form interracial labor unions in the South.Introduction PART I: AMERICAN PLURALISM AND APPALACHIA Evangelizing Equality: Mountain Whites, Missionaries, and Millionaires (1834-1899) Marketing Mountaineers: Ancestors, Empire, and Regional Ethnogenesis (1892-1909) A New Republic: Harvard, Howard, and the New School for Social Research (1895-1920) Jewish Publishing, Cultural Pluralism, and Regional Appalachia (1914-1932) Reactionary Regionalism v. Southern Critical Quarterlies (1925-1945) PART II: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY Racing the Earth: Jesse Stuart's Man with a Bull Tongue Plow (1934) 'Authentic Folk Feeling': James Still's Hounds on the Mountain (1937) Rebinding 'The Book of the Dead,'? Radical Modernists, and Appalachia: Muriel? Rukeyser's U. S. 1 (1938) The Tight Rope of Democracy: Don West's Clods of Southern Earth (1946)

The Social Life of Poetry makes a significant contribution to the contemporary study of race and place as it historically maps the cultural circulation of works by four poets writing about Appalachia. Not only does this book fill a gap in recent whiteness studies, it alsolsK