Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression

Literature, Amusement and Technology examines the exchange between literature and recreational practices in 1930s America. William Solomon argues that autobiographical writers like Edward Dahlberg and Henry Miller took aesthetic inspiration from urban manifestations of the carnival spirit: Coney Island amusement parks, burlesque, vaudeville, and the dime museum display of human oddities. More broadly, he demonstrates that the literary projects of the period pivoted around images of grotesquely disfigured bodies which appeared as part of this recreational culture. Figures of corporeal fragmentation also proved important to novelists such as Nathanael West and John Dos Passos who were concerned to resist the ideological force of spectacular forms of mass entertainment like the World’s Fairs, Hollywood film and military ceremonies. Psychic, social, aesthetic and political tensions were thus managed in Depression-era American literature in relation to communal modes of play. This study will appeal to scholars of twentieth-century American literature and culture.

• A pioneering inquiry into the interaction between radical literature and commercial amusement in Depression-era America • Covers a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writers • Examines the role of body images in relation to sexual, social and political identities in the 1930s

Introduction: disfigurations; 1. Disinterring Edward Dahlberg; 2. Laughter and depression: Henry Miller and the emergence of the technocarnivalesque; Intermission: vulgar Marxism; 3. Fascism and fragmentation in Nathanael West; 4. Militarism and mutilation in John Dos Passos; Postface: discharges.