1930 Ransom, Tate, Warren, et al I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners
1931 Edmund Wilson Axel’s Castle: A Study in Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
1932 V. F. Calverton The Liberation of American Literature [“The Puritan Myth,” “From Revolution to Reaction,” “…Nationalism,” “Liberation”…]
1932 Virginia Woolf The Second Common Reader [“How Should One Read a Book?”…]
1933 Granville Hicks The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War
1934 John Dewey Art as Experience [“Art and Civilization”…]
1934 Max Eastman Art and the Life of Action (With Other Essays) [“The Artist and the Social Engineer”…]
1934 Max Eastman Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism [“The New American Literature,” “The Marxian Aesthetics”…]
1934 Henry James The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces
1935 Granville Hicks, Ed., et al Proletarian Literature in the United States [“Introduction,” Joseph Freeman, “…Problems of Revolutionary Literature”…]
1936 T. S. Eliot Essays Ancient and Modern [“Religion and Literature,” “Modern Education and the Classics”…]
1936 James T. Farrell A Note on Literary Criticism [“Literature and Propaganda,” “Left-Wing Dualism,” “Marx on the Relative Aesthetic”…]
1936 Allen Tate Reactionary Essays
1937 Mary M. Colum From These Roots: The Ideas that Have Made Modern Literature [reprinted, 1967]
1937 Morton D. Zabel, Ed. Literary Opinion in America; Volumes I and II. [revised, 1962]
1937 Herbert Read Art and Society
1938 Edmund Wilson The Triple Thinkers [revised, 1948; corrected, 1963] [“The Politics of Flaubert,” “Historical Interpretation of Literature”…]
1939 Granville Hicks Figures of Transition: A Study of British Literature at the End of the 19th Century [“Socialism and William Morris”…]
1939 Bernard L. Smith Forces in American Criticism: A Study in the History of American Literary Thought [“The Rise of Critical Traditions”…]
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1940 Roger Dataller The Plain Man and the Novel [“The Novel as Propaganda,” “The Historical Novel,” “The Social Novel”…]
1941 Joseph Warren Beach American Fiction, 1920-1940 [“John Steinbeck: Art and Propaganda”…]
1941 Kenneth Burke The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action [revised, 1973] [“The Nature of Art Under Capitalism”…]
1941 Van Wyck Brooks On Literature Today
1941 Sterling A. Brown, Ed., et al The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes [new introduction by Lester, 1969]
1941 Edmund Wilson The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature [revised, 1952]
1942 Alfred Kazin On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature [“Criticism at the Poles”…]
1943 Herbert Read The Politics of the Unpolitical
1943 Edmund Wilson, Ed. The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It;
Volumes I and II [revised, 1955]
1946 Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
1946 Alex Comfort Art and Social Responsibility: Lectures on the Ideology of Romanticism
1946 George Orwell Dickens, Dali and Others
1946 George Orwell “Why I Write,” in A Collection of Essays, 1954
1946 Mark Schorer William Blake: The Politics of Vision
1947 E.B. Burgum The Novel and the World’s Dilemma
1947 Engels and Marx Literature and Art: Selections from Their Writings
1947 Maxwell Geismar Writers in Crisis: The American Novel, 1925-1940
1947 Stanley Edgar Hyman The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism [revised, 1955] [“The Ideal Critic,” “The Actual Critic”…]
1947 Herbert Read The Grass Roots of Art: Lectures on Social Aspects of Art in an Industrial Age
1947 Herbert Read Education Through Art
1948 Walter Allen Writers on Writing [“The Ends and Uses of Poetry,” “The Novelist’s Responsibility”…]
1948 Alex Comfort The Novel and Our Time [“The Concept of Responsibility”…]
1948 F. R. Leavis The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
1948 Mark Schorer, Ed., et al Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgement
1949 Maxwell Geismar The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel, 1915-1925
1949 H. L. Mencken A Mencken Chrestomathy [Essays, 1916-1948] “The Critical Process,” etc.
1949 Edwin Muir Essays on Literature and Society [Enlarged and Revised, 1965]
1949 Wellek and Warren Theory of Literature [“Literature and Society”…]
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1950 Gilbert Highet The Art of Teaching [“Authors and Artists”…]
1950 Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society [“The Meaning of a Literary Idea”…]
1952 Edmund Wilson A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950
1952 Edmund Wilson The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the 1920s and 1930s [“Literary Class War,” “American Critics, Left and Right”…]
1953 M. H. Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
1953 Isaiah Berlin The Hedgehog and the Fox [Revised, 1978]
1953 Van Wyck Brooks The Writer in America
1953 Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. Norms for the Novel [“Literature as a Moral Activity, …as Fundamentally Religious, …as Inspiration”…]
1953 Maxwell Geismar Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel, 1890-1915 [“Jack London”…]
1953 Gilbert Highet Juvenal the Satirist
1954 Walter Allen The English Novel: A Short Critical History
1955 James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son [“Everybody’s Protest Novel”…]
1955 Joseph L. Blotner The Political Novel
1956 J. M. Cohen A History of Western Literature
1956 Frank O’Connor The Mirror in the Roadway: A Study of the Modern Novel
1956 Walter B. Rideout The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society [“Class War”…]
1957 Richard Chase The American Novel and Its Tradition [“Norris and Naturalism”…]
1957 Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism
1957 Granville Hicks, Ed. The Living Novel: A Symposium [“Ralph Ellison: Society, Morality, and the Novel”…]
1957 Irving Howe Politics and the Novel [“The Idea of the Political Novel,” “Orwell: History as Nightmare”…]
1957 Wright Morris The Territory Ahead: Critical Interpretations in American Literature
1957 Philip Rahv, Ed. Literature in America: An Anthology of Literary Criticism
1957 Ian Watt The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding
1957 Rebecca West The Court and the Castle: A Study of the Interactions of Religious and Political Ideas in Imaginative Literature
1957 Wimsatt and Brooks Literary Criticism: A Short History [“The Real and the Social: Art as Propaganda”…]
1958 M. H. Abrams, Ed. Literature and Belief: English Institute Essays, 1957
1958 Malcolm Cowley, Ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series
1958 Edmund Fuller Man in Modern Fiction: Some Minority Opinions on Contemporary American Writing
1958 Maxwell Geismar American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity [“Higher and Higher Criticism,” “The ‘End’ of Naturalism”…]
1959 Miriam Allott Novelists on the Novel [“No Politics?” (Stendhal), “The Writer’s Responsibility” (G. Eliot), “Ethics of the Novel” (various)…]
1959 William R. Mueller The Prophetic Voice in Modern Fiction: Major Writings of Joyce, Camus, Kafka, Silone, Faulkner, Green
1960-1989 BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTENTS
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Bibliography – 1800s to 2003
Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003
Quick Views
Social and Political Novel
Social and Political Literature
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A Practical Policy 