Revolutionary and writer: how do they fit together in one person’s work? Using literary texts from French, German, Russian and American pro-revolutionary writers, Sheila Delany examines the synergy of politics and rhetoric, art and social commitment. The writers she considers gave voice to the hopes of their time. Some led the events in person as well as through their writing; others worked to build a movement. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Mao, Sylvain Maréchal, Boris Lavrenov, Bertolt Brecht and others are here: consummate rhetoricians all, not necessarily on the same page politically but for the revolutions of their day.
Sheila Delany, Ph.D. (1967) Columbia University, is Professor Emerita at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Her books and articles on medieval literature and in Jewish studies helped bring Marxian method, gender awareness, and critical theory into medieval studies.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1Political Style/Political Stylistics
2Marxist Medievalists A Tradition
3Red Rosa Bread and Roses
4Politics of the Signified in Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken
5Women, Culture, and Revolution in Russia Boris Lavrenov’s “The Forty-First”
6Anti-saints A Revolutionary’s Legendary
7St. Genevieve in the Revolution Sylvain Maréchal’s Counter-History
8The Woman Priest Obsession, Cross-Dressing, and Canada in an Eighteenth-Century French Novella
9An Atheist Reads the Bible in Revolutionary France
10Bible, Jews, Revolution
Index
Students at any level and general readers interested in French, German or Russian literature, left politics, modern revolutionary history, and rhetoric.