The Radical Novel in the United States 1900–1954

Rideout, Walter B.

doi:10.7312/ride94076

Cited by 8 publications

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“…Rideout describes Michael Gold's 1930 novel Jews without Money as possessing "the rhetoric of intense emotion, an emotion that is always on the verge-and frequently well beyond the verge-of diving into sentimentality." 23 Gold promoted sentimentalism while editor of The New Masses, the literary magazine of the Communist Party USA and an important venue for radical authors. In a January 1929 essay for New Masses entitled "Go Left, Young Writers!"…”

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“…Walter Rideout, for instance, claims, "Jurgis's militant acceptance of Socialism" in The Jungle "is far less creatively realized than his previous victimization" because "Sinclair's outraged moral idealism is attracted more to the pathos than the power of the poor." 31 Rideout was perhaps The Harbor's most prominent champion, yet he also inadvertently undercuts his case for what he called "the best Socialist novel of all," when he suggests that it was not until the emergence of John Dos Passos, with his "technical brilliance and sardonic objectivity," that the radical novel moved beyond the "artistically crude and […] sentimental." 32 Lewis Mumford paid The Harbor a similarly backhanded compliment in his 1957 introduction to The Golden Day: Poole, he allowed, had written "a minor work that nevertheless took a special place in our imagination."…”

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“…31 Rideout was perhaps The Harbor's most prominent champion, yet he also inadvertently undercuts his case for what he called "the best Socialist novel of all," when he suggests that it was not until the emergence of John Dos Passos, with his "technical brilliance and sardonic objectivity," that the radical novel moved beyond the "artistically crude and […] sentimental." 32 Lewis Mumford paid The Harbor a similarly backhanded compliment in his 1957 introduction to The Golden Day: Poole, he allowed, had written "a minor work that nevertheless took a special place in our imagination." For Mumford, The Harbor exemplified American fiction's tendency, "at this period," to "lurch from the morass of sentimentality into an almost equally maudlin swamp of realism."…”

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The Jungle, The Harbor, and the Left’s Early Reception of Radical Sentimentalism

Cadle

2024

J. gilded age prog. era

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This essay examines the efforts of Upton Sinclair and Ernest Poole to connect their respective novels The Jungle and The Harbor to the nineteenth-century sentimental literary tradition, as well as their leftist allies’ reception of those efforts. Sinclair consistently presented The Jungle as a second Uncle Tom’s Cabin, capable of moving readers to agitate on behalf of working-class immigrants, while Poole engaged reflexively with the tropes and traditions of sentimentalism in order to model for his readers how they should respond to The Harbor. Although both novels became bestsellers and influenced later writers of proletarian fiction, early leftist critics dismissed Sinclair and Poole’s sentimentalism as aesthetically simplistic and politically naïve. This essay turns instead to a slightly later contemporary of those critics, Antonio Gramsci, whose prison writings argue for the revolutionary potential of sentimentalism. Reading The Jungle and The Harbor through the lens of Gramsci’s analysis of organic intellectuals and the cathartic power of popular literary forms, this essay contends, resolves many of the problems those early critics identified in the novels.

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