Research Guides: Radical Literature: Books and Articles

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Books, Articles, and other Resources about Radical Literature

Radical literature in America; an address by Frederick B. Adams, jr., to which is appended a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Grolier club in New York city. by Frederick B. Adams
Call Number: Z7164.S67 A17
Publication Date: 1939
The Radical Novel and the Classless Society by Robert Birdwell
ISBN: 9781498570411
Publication Date: 2018-10-15
The Radical Novel and the Classless Society analyzes utopian and proletarian novels as a single socialist tradition in U.S. literature. Utopian novels by such writers as Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sutton E. Griggs and proletarian novels by such writers as Robert Cantwell, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Meridel Le Sueur, Claude McKay, and Ralph Ellison can help us conceive of a unity of utopian and Marxist socialisms. We can combine the imagination of the future classless society with present-day socialist strategy. Utopian and proletarian novels help us to imagine--and realize--the classless society as achieving the utopian goal of recognizing race and gender and the Marxist goal of overcoming social class.
The radical tradition : twelve essays on politics, education, and literature by R.H. Tawney and Rita Hinden
Call Number: HX696 .T3 1967
Publication Date: 1964
Title: Radical Intellect : Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s by Christopher M. Tinson
Publication Date: 2017
Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660 by Marcus Nevitt
ISBN: 0754641155
Publication Date: 2016-07-20
Offering an analysis of the ways in which groups of non-aristocratic women circumvented a number of interdictions against female participation in the pamphlet culture of revolutionary England, this book is primarily a study of female agency. Despite the fact that pamphlets, or cheap unbound books, have recently been located among the most inclusive or democratic aspects of the social life of early modern England, this study provides a more gender-sensitive picture. Marcus Nevitt argues instead that throughout the revolutionary decades pamphlet culture was actually constructed around the public silence and exclusion of women. In support of his thesis, he discusses more familiar seventeenth-century authors such as John Milton, John Selden and Thomas Edwards in relation to the less canonical but equally forceful writings of Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Poole, Mary Pope, 'Parliament Joan' and a large number of Quaker women. This is the first sustained study of the relationship between female agency and cheap print throughout the revolutionary decades 1640 to 1660. It adds to the study of gender in the field of the English Revolution by engaging with recent work in the history of the book, stressing the materiality of texts and the means and physical processes by which women's writing emerged through the printing press and networks of publication and dissemination. It will stimulate welcome debate about the nature and limits of discursive freedom in the early modern period, and for women in particular.
Left of the Color Line by Bill V. Mullen (Editor); James Smethurst (Editor)
Call Number: UMBC Stacks PS228.R32 L44 2003
ISBN: 0807827991
Publication Date: 2003-10-27
This collection of fifteen new essays explores the impact of the organized Left and Leftist theory on American literature and culture from the 1920s to the present. In particular, the contributors explore the participation of writers and intellectuals on the Left in the development of African American, Chicano/Chicana, and Asian American literature and culture. By placing the Left at the center of their examination, the authors reposition the interpretive framework of American cultural studies. Tracing the development of the Left over the course of the last century, the essays connect the Old Left of the pre-World War II era to the New Left and Third World nationalist Left of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to the multicultural Left that has emerged since the 1970s. Individual essays explore the Left in relation to the work of such key figures as Ralph Ellison, T. S. Eliot, Chester Himes, Harry Belafonte, Americo Paredes, and Alice Childress. The collection also reconsiders the role of the Left in such critical cultural and historical moments as the Harlem Renaissance, the Cold War, and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The contributors are Anthony Dawahare, Barbara Foley, Marcial Gonzalez, Fred Ho, William J. Maxwell, Bill V. Mullen, Cary Nelson, B. V. Olguin, Rachel Rubin, Eric Schocket, James Smethurst, Michelle Stephens, Alan Wald, and Mary Helen Washington.
The Radical Reader by Timothy Patrick McCarthy (Editor); John Campbell McMillian (Editor)
Call Number: UMBC Stacks HN90.R3 R355 2003
ISBN: 1565848276
Publication Date: 2003-08-01
Radicalism is as American as apple pie. One can scarcely imagine what American society would look like without the abolitionists, feminists, socialists, union organizers, civil rights workers, gay and lesbian activists, and environmentalists who have fought stubbornly to breathe life into the promises of freedom and equality that lie at the heart of American democracy. The first anthology of its kind, The Radical Reader brings together more than 200 primary documents in a comprehensive collection of the writings of America's native radical tradition. Spanning the time from the colonial period to the twenty-first century, the documents have been drawn from a wealth of sources--speeches, manifestos, newspaper editorials, literature, pamphlets, and private letters. From Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics," these are the documents that sparked, guided, and distilled the most influential movements in American history. Brief introductory essays by the editors provide a rich biographical and historical context for each selection included.
Anti-Book by Nicholas Thoburn
ISBN: 0816621969
Publication Date: 2016-12-15
No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms "a communism of textual matter," Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a "post-digital" approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books--to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud's paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord's sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as "communist object," the magazine as "diagrammatic publishing," political books in the modes of "root" and "rhizome," the "multiple single" of anonymous authorship, and myth as "unidentified narrative object." An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists' books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.
Remaking Radicalism by Dan Berger (Editor); Emily K. Hobson (Editor)
Call Number: UMBC Stacks HN90.R3 R466 2020
ISBN: 9780820357263
Publication Date: 2020-10-01
This book brings together documents from multiple radical movements in the recent United States from 1973 through 2001. These years are typically viewed as an era of neoliberalism, dominated by conservative retrenchment, the intensified programs of privatization and incarceration, dramatic cuts to social welfare, and the undermining of labor, antiracist, and feminist advances. Yet activists from the period proved tenacious in the face of upheaval, resourceful in creating new tactics, and dedicated to learning from one another. Persistent and resolute, activists did more than just keep radical legacies alive. They remade radicalism--bridging differences of identity and ideology often assumed to cleave movements, grappling with the eradication of liberal promises, and turning to movement cultures as the source of a just future. Remaking Radicalism is the first anthology of U.S. radicalisms that reveals the depth, diversity, and staying power of social movements after the close of the long 1960s. Editors Dan Berger and Emily Hobson track the history of popular struggles during a time that spans the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush and bring to readers the political upheavals that shaped the end of the century and that continue to define the present.
Smoking Typewriters by John McMillian
Call Number: UMBC Stacks PN4888.U5 M35 2011
ISBN: 0195319923
Publication Date: 2011-02-17
How did the New Left uprising of the 1960s happen? What caused millions of young people-many of them affluent and college educated-to suddenly decide that American society needed to be completely overhauled? In Smoking Typewriters, historian John McMillian shows that one answer to these questions can be found in the emergence of a dynamic underground press in the 1960s. Following the lead of papers like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and the Berkeley Barb, young people across the country launched hundreds of mimeographed pamphlets and flyers, small press magazines, and underground newspapers. New, cheaper printing technologies democratized the publishing process and by the decade's end the combined circulation of underground papers stretched into the millions. Though not technically illegal, these papers were often genuinely subversive, and many of those who produced and sold them-on street-corners, at poetry readings, gallery openings, and coffeehouses-became targets of harassment from local and federal authorities. With writers who actively participated in the events they described, underground newspapers captured the zeitgeist of the '60s, speaking directly to their readers, and reflecting and magnifying the spirit of cultural and political protest. McMillian pays special attention to the ways underground newspapers fostered a sense of community and played a vital role in shaping the New Left's highly democratic "movement culture." Deeply researched and eloquently written, Smoking Typewriters captures all the youthful idealism and vibrant tumult of the 1960s as it delivers a brilliant reappraisal of the origins and development of the New Left rebellion.
Takin' It to the Streets by Alexander Bloom
ISBN: 9780190250706
Publication Date: 2015-11-16
The fourth edition of Takin' it to the streets revises the comprehensive collection of primary documents from the 1960s that has become the leading reader about the era. Adopted nationwide, this anthology brings together representative writings, many of which had been unavailable for years or had never been reprinted. Drawn from mainstream sources, little-known sixties periodicals, pamphlets, public speeches, and personal voices, the selections range from the Port Huron Statement and the NOW Bill of Rights to speeches by Malcolm X, Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, to private letters from civil rights workers and Vietnam soldiers. Introductions and headnotes by the editors highlight the importance of particular documents, relating them to each other and placing them within the broader context of the decade. The book focuses on civil rights, Black Power, the counterculture, the women's movement, anti-war activity, gay and lesbian struggles, and the conservative current that ran counter to more typical sixties movements. These include both topics that fell outside the daily attention of the media and those that made front-page news. Covering an extremely popular period of history, Takin' it to the streets remains the most accessible and authoritative reader of an extraordinary decade, one unlike any America had seen before or has experienced since. New to This Edition * A new section on John F. Kennedy, including Norman Mailer's 1960 assessment of JFK * New selections on Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and the Underground Press * A new chapter of assessments and on the legacy of the 1960s, including articles by Howard Zinn, Fred Barnes, Arthur Schlesinger, and Michael Kazin
Socialism and Print Culture in America, 1897-1920 by Jason D. Martinek
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9781848933354
Publication Date: 2012-09-01
For socialists at the turn of the last century, reading was a radical act. This interdisciplinary study looks at how American socialists used literacy in the struggle against capitalism.
Modern Print Activism in the United States by Rachel Schreiber
ISBN: 9781409454786
Publication Date: 2013-04-11
Print media have been used throughout the twentieth century to promote social and political activism. At a time when the golden age of print appears to be ending, Modern Print Activism in the United States argues that print activism should be studied as a specifically modernist phenomenon and poses questions related to the efficacy of print as a vehicle for social and political change.
Social Justice Journalism by Carolyn Kitch (Editorial Board Member); David Perlmutter (Editorial Board Member); Paula M. Poindexter (Editorial Board Member); Richard Waters (Editorial Board Member); Linda J. Lumsden
ISBN: 9781433165054
Publication Date: 2019-07-29
Social Justice Journalism: A Cultural History of Social Movement Media from Abolition to #womensmarch argues that to better understand the evolution, impact, and future of digital social justice media we need to understand their connections to a venerable print culture of dissent. This cultural history seeks to deepen and contextualize knowledge about digital activist journalism by training the lens of social movement theory back on the nearly forgotten role of eight twentieth-century American social justice journals in effecting significant social change. The book deliberately conflates "social movement media" with newer and broader conceptions of "social justice journalism" to highlight changing definitions of journalism in the digital era. It uses framing theory, social movement theory, and theories about the power of facts and emotion in storytelling to show how social movement media practice journalism to mobilize collective action for their cause. After tracing the evolution and functions of each social justice movement's print culture, each chapter concludes with a comparison to its online counterparts to illuminate links with digital media. The book concludes that digital activist journalism, while in some ways unique, also shares continuities and commonalities with its print predecessors.
American Left by Loren Baritz (Editor)
Call Number: UMBC Stacks HN90.R3 B35
ISBN: 0465001440
Publication Date: 1971-10-01
Passionate Commitments by Julia M. Allen
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9781438446875
Publication Date: 2013-06-01
A story of two twentieth-century American women whose love for each other fueled their work to create an egalitarian world.
American Left, 1955-1970 : a national union catalog of pamphlets published in the United States and Canada by Ned Kehde
Call Number: UMBC Stacks
ISBN: 0837182824
Publication Date: 1976-09-29
Women and the American left : a guide to sources by Mari Jo Buhle
Call Number: UMBC Stacks HQ1420 .B84
ISBN: 9780816181957
Publication Date: 1983-10-01
Modern Black Nationalism by William L. Van Deburg (Editor)
Call Number: UMBC Stacks E185.61 .M676 1997
ISBN: 0814787886
Publication Date: 1996-12-01
Since its dramatic growth under Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association during the 1920s, black nationalism has played a central role in American political and intellectual life. In Modern Black Nationalism, William L. Van Deburg has collected the most influential speeches, pamphlets, and articles that trace the development of black nationalism in the 20th century. Beginning with Marcus Garvey, the acknowledged father of the 20th-century movement, William L. Van Deburg here provides a showcase of the work of more than fifty prominent thinkers including Louis Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammad, Maulana Karenga, the founder of Kwanzaa, Amiri Baraka and Molefi Asante. Rare pamphlets distributed by organizations such as the Black Panther Party, articles from underground magazines, and memos from governmental officials offer a fresh look at the roots and the manifestations of this movement.
We Called Each Other Comrade by Allen Ruff; Paul Buhle (Foreword by)
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9781604865745
Publication Date: 2011-07-01
A fascinating exploration of left-wing culture, this revealing chronicle of Charles H. Kerr and his revolutionary publishing company looks at the remarkable list of books, periodicals and pamphlets that the firm produced and traces the strands of a rich tradition of dissent in America. Tracing Kerr's political development and commitment to radical social change, We Called Each Other Comrade also tells the story of the difficulties of exercising the freedom of expression in an often hostile economic and political climate.
Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars by Anthony Dawahare
Call Number: UMBC Stacks PS153.N5 D34 2003
ISBN: 1578065070
Publication Date: 2002-11-15
During and after the Harlem Renaissance, two intellectual forces --nationalism and Marxism--clashed and changed the future of African American writing. Current literary thinking says that writers with nationalist leanings wrote the most relevant fiction, poetry, and prose of the day. Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box challenges that notion. It boldly proposes that such writers as A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, who often saw the world in terms of class struggle, did more to advance the anti-racist politics of African American letters than writers such as Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey, who remained enmeshed in nationalist and racialist discourse. Evaluating the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on black authors from the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression era, Anthony Dawahare argues that the spread of nationalist ideologies and movements between the world wars did guide legitimate political desires of black writers for a world without racism. But the nationalist channels of political and cultural resistance did not address the capitalist foundation of modern racial discrimination. During the period known as the "Red Decade" (1929-1941), black writers developed some of the sharpest critiques of the capitalist world and thus anticipated contemporary scholarship on the intellectual and political hazards of nationalism for the working class. As it examines the progression of the Great Depression, the book focuses on the shift of black writers to the Communist Left, including analyses of the Communists' position on the "Negro Question," the radical poetry of Langston Hughes, and the writings of Richard Wright.

Here are some of the articles that can be found within UMBC's databases (search for more articles using the AOK OneSearch for Articles (second box on this page) :

Lonardo, Michael. 1994. “The International Labour and Radical History Pamphlet Collection at Memorial University of Newfoundland.” Labour / Le Travail 34: 211–15. doi:10.2307/25143851.

Birkinshaw, Catherine. 2007. “Revolutionary Pamphlet Propaganda, 1788-1789.” French Studies Bulletin: A Quarterly Supplement 102: 6–15. doi:10.1093/frebul/ktl047.

McMillian, John. “‘Our Founder, the Mimeograph Machine’: Participatory Democracy in Students for a Democratic Society’s Print Culture.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 2, no. 2 (September 2008): 85–110. doi:10.1353/jsr.0.0010

Ned Kehde. 1970. “The New Left and a New Age of Pamphlets: Recommendations for a Radical Pamphlet Library.” American Libraries 1 (9): 873–76. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,uid&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.25618061&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Rhodes, Jane. 2009. “The Black Press and Radical Print Culture.” In A History of the Book in America, Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson, 286–303. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,uid&db=mzh&AN=2009382154&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Ferretti, Federico. 2017. “Publishing Anarchism: Pyotr Kropotkin and British Print Cultures, 1876–1917.” Journal of Historical Geography 57 (July): 17–27. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2017.04.006.

Fay, Brendan. 2020. “Becoming Socialist: Print Culture and the Global Revolutionary Moment, 1880–1914.” Information & Culture 55 (2): 130–48. doi:10.7560/ic55202.

Thatcher, Ian D. 2016. “The Russian Revolutionary Constitution and Pamphlet Literature in the 1917 Russian Revolution.” Europe-Asia Studies 68 (10): 1635–53. doi:10.1080/09668136.2016.1184231.

Below are some selected theses and dissertations. Search Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global for more resources on radical literature (must be signed in with UMBC login):

Silva, Marie Louise. 2010. "Radical Reading: Print Culture and the San Francisco Labor Movement, 1880-1889." Order No. 1488153, San Jose State University. http://proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/radical-reading-print-culture-san-francisco-labor/docview/849719744/se-2?accountid=14577.

Martinek, Jason D. 2005. "“Mental Dynamite”: Radical Literacy and American Socialists' Print Culture of Dissent, 1897–1917." Order No. 3193409, Carnegie Mellon University. http://proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/mental-dynamite-radical-literacy-american/docview/305006680/se-2?accountid=14577.

Sangrey, Trevor Joy. 2012. "“Put One More ‘s’ in the USA”: Communist Pamphlet Literature and the Productive Fiction of the Black Nation Thesis." Order No. 3521817, University of California, Santa Cruz. http://proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/put-one-more-s-usa-communist-pamphlet-literature/docview/1035151503/se-2?accountid=14577.

Johnson, Jeffrey Alan. 2004. "Socialist Party Politics and Activism in the Northwest, 1895–1925." Order No. 3160477, Washington State University. http://proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/socialist-party-politics-activism-northwest-1895/docview/305108083/se-2?accountid=14577.

Belmonte, Laura Ann. 1996. "Defending a Way of Life: American Propaganda and the Cold War, 1945-1959." Order No. 9708633, University of Virginia. http://proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/defending-way-life-american-propaganda-cold-war/docview/304309966/se-2?accountid=14577.

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