-
“Her symbol was civil war”: Recovering Muriel Rukeyser’s Lost Spanish Civil War Novel
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2013
- pp. 416-439
- 10.1353/mfs.2013.0025
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
In 1936, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Spain to report on the People’s Olympiad, an alternative to Hitler’s Berlin games. Instead, she witnessed the outbreak of civil war. Rukeyser’s writings on her experience span more than forty years, including a lost, unpublished novel, Savage Coast. Recently recovered from her archive, the novel is significant because it hybridizes the forms of aesthetic and political modernism and provides a more complex understanding of how women modernists write about politics and history through modes that both interrogate and transform the boundaries of genre.