Barbara Foley

• Rutgers University-Newark

“Retrospective Radicalism” argues that when Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is deeply historicized, its embedded political allegory becomes visible. The submerged part of the text’s “iceberg” includes the years 1918–1929, when the possibility for a left revolution in Italy was defeated by the consolidation of fascism. Hemingway’s political radicalis...

Ralph Ellison’s “Hickman Novel”—upon which Three Days Before the Shooting… is based—reveals that the Popular Front-era radicalism largely effaced from Invisible Man continued to fuel Ellison’s imagination. Although he had established his bona fides as a cold warrior in Invisible Man, Ellison retained certain leftist ideas and insights that both ins...

As demonstrated by the workings of the political unconscious in Jean Toomer’s Cane and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, investigation of authorial biography is an indispensable component of Marxist literary criticism. Symptomatic reading, while derogated by the advocates of “surface reading,” remains crucial to textual interpretation.

In Wrestling with the Left, Barbara Foley presents a penetrating analysis of the creation of Invisible Man. In the process she sheds new light not only on Ralph Ellison’s celebrated novel but also on his early radicalism and the relationship between African American writers and the left during the early years of the cold war. Foley scrutinized thou...

Modern Fiction Studies 42.2 (1996) 289-321 --Jean Toomer --Jean Toomer, "Reflections on the Race Riots" It is a critical commonplace that Jean Toomer's Cane is a largely autobiographical work displaying its author's discovery of his profound identification with African Americans and their culture. This concern is signaled in Toomer's own often-quot...

Daniel aaron, writing about American literary communism at the turn into the 1960s, concluded that the literary radicalism of the 1930s had been one more “turn in the cycle of revolt” characterizing the generational politics of American writers since the early 19th Century. The American writer's “running quarrel with his [sic] society” springs “as...

Although the so-called nonfiction novel is ordinarily seen as a distinctly post-World War II phenomenon, Afro-American literature has from its beginnings relied to a marked degree on the documentary mode. Close scrutiny of Afro-American prose narrative provides the basis not only for revising some common literary-historical generalizations but also...