Simply to Be Americans? Literary Radicals Confront Monopoly Capitalism, 1885-1938

Wendland-Liu deftly navigates decades of radical literary figures who struggled with the question of “what is an American?” during a defining era of American monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and racial and class subjugation. A work of theory, literary analysis, history, and social commentary, “Simply to Be Americans?” re-imagines American literary icons while introducing audiences to lesser-known authors and thinkers who, undaunted, forged a revolutionary social tradition that continues to demand more of our shared cultural identity of “American.” “Simply to Be Americans?” is an important addition to revolutionary’s library.

Prof. Dr. Melissa Ford

Slippery Rock University

“Simply to Be Americans?” is a wide-ranging and sensitive investigation of different strands of U.S. literary radicalism that critiqued monopoly capitalism through the adoption or rejection of different modes of being "American" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wendland-Liu excels in close readings that give new insights into texts that we thought we knew and put those texts in discussion with others we may not have considered before.

Prof. Dr. James Smethurst

W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies

University of Massachusetts-Amherst