Description
Book SynopsisGeorge Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment.
Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and connections across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions.
Trade ReviewBringing together art, literature, philosophy, and music, Hutchinson has created a kind of critical mosaic that produces insights that open up the 1940s as a cultural field, grounded in the ungrounded processes of art as incalculable experience. The juxtapositions of unconnected figures induce in the reader a new vision of the era and new dimensions of the authors and works discussed. It is a work of exceptionally deft intellectual choreography, conducted with enviable precision and concision. -- Ross Posnock, Columbia University
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. When Literature Mattered
2. Popular Culture and the Avant-Garde
3. Labor, Politics, and the Arts
4. The War
5. America! America! A Jewish Renaissance?
6. A Rising Wind: “Literature of the Negro” and Civil Rights
7. Queer Horizons
8. Women and Power
9. Culture and Ecology
Epilogue: One World
Notes
Index
