Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism (review)
Foley shows how each novel pushed a communist ideology within the framework of its mostly bourgeois narrative through the "fictional autobiography," the "Bildungsroman," the "social novel," or, the one innovative form, the "collective novel." With the exception of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, in which Foley, who has written extensively on Dos Passos, takes guilty pleasure even if its technical mastery results in suspect politics, none of these often turgid novels comes alive. Still she hopes "to interest . . . 'naive' students" and "left-oriented readers" in proletarian novels. As Foley makes clear, there is much to learn, both politically and aesthetically, from these texts and their contexts.