Revolutionary Memory

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is the editor of the Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford). He has co-authored or co-edited several books for Routledge, including Academic Keywords, Madrid 1937, and Cultural Studies.

• Introduction One: Modern Poems We Have Wanted to Forget 1. A poetry Dossier 2. Establishment Memory and Political poetry 3. The Assault on Langston Hughes 4. Naming Names Two: From the Great Depression to the Red Scare: The Poetry of Edwin Rolfe 1. Poetry as Lived History 2. The Lessons of Spain 3. Poetry Against McCarthyism Three: Poetry Chorus: The Politics of Revolutionary Memory 1. The Community of the Left 2. Tillie Olsen's Sweat Shop Poem 3. Revolution's Collective Voice Poetry Chorus: How Much for Spain? 1. Don Quixote in Prison 2. When Madrid Was the Tomb of Fascism 3. A Lament for Garcia Lorca 4. Exile without End

"Cary Nelson's Revolutionary Memory offers exhaustive scholarship of a genuinely lived kind, as personal interviews and rare artifacts of material poetic culture--texts marked up for performance, poems transcribed onto postcards home, scrapbook entries--reveal the meanings and uses of poetry in people's everyday lives and reflect this book's remarkable level of historical detail." -- AmericanLiterature"Nelson's book is an important realization of the sort of literary archaeology that he called for in Repression and Recovery. It is particularly valuable in its sustained attention to the poetics, practice, context, influence, and achievement of the Depression generation of Left poets, placing (or replacing) those poets within longer and larger Left traditions." -- James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Radical Teacher