| Abstrakt: |
Most scholars who have examined the left-wing American publication the New Masses have centred their work on the 1930's and situated the magazine within a proletarian tradition informed by Michael Gold's editorial voice. Focusing on the period between 1926–1929 (the time in which the magazine was in the process of finding its artistic grounding) this paper recovers and re-enters the dynamic cultural dialogue in the magazine surrounding issues of literature and inequality in the period prior to the Great Depression. A dialogical reading of the poems, stories, essays, and images published during this period reveals conflicting perspectives on the role of the artist and the image of the worker, while also illuminating editorial and artistic tensions as the magazine attempted to define its identity against its predecessors and construct a modern literary aesthetic rooted in class struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
