Popular Front

This thesis examines the historical practices of the left-wing Popular Front cultural movement in Britain in the late 1930s, as well as their relationship to more established British historical traditions. To achieve this, it draws on a collection of written historical works, pu…

Red Lives is a side-by-side social and intellectual biography of Claudia Jones, Emma Tenayuca, and Ah Quon McElrath, three working-class women who came-of-age during the Great Depression, and whose lifelong commitments to grassroots organizing and radical politics emerged from t…

This dissertation explores three proletarian novels published at the end of the Depression era—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—in light of how their aesthetics complicates the inherited episte…