Meet Me On the Barricades /
Charles Yale Harrison ; edited and with an introduction by Bart Vautour & Emily Robins Sharpe.
- A critical edition.
- Ottawa : University of Ottawa Press, 2016.
- xxix, 125 p. : cov. ill. ; 21 cm.
- Canadian Literature .
- Canadian literature collection. .
Also available in electronic format.
Includes bibliographical references. About the Author: "Charles Yale Harrison (1898-1954) was an author, activist, and editor. He was born in Philadelphia and raised in a Jewish family in Montreal. A dedicated fellow traveller, Harrison moved from Montreal to New York in the 1920s, where he worked on the staff of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA)-led magazine "New Masses" alongside outspoken literary critics of proletarian culture such as Mike Gold. He was also a founding member of one of a series of John Reed Clubs, established in 1929 to create a forum for lefist writers. Drawing on his own experience in the First World War, he published "Generals Die in Bed" (1930), a scathingly anti-war novel about the horrors of trench warfare. It was followed by the novels "A Child is Born" (1931), "There are Victories" (1933), "Meet Me on the Barricades" (1938), and "Nobody's Fool" (1948), as well as a biography of the American socialist lawyer Clarence Darrow (1931)." (Book Cover)
"Meet Me on the Barricades is a hallucinatory, comic novel that traverses world history, revolutionary theory, classical music, literary theory, and anti-Stalinism against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. It recounts a few days in the life of P. Herbert Simpson, a middle-aged, weak-hearted oboist with th New York Symphony Orchestra who, instead of fighting on the battlefields of Spain, daydreams about heroic action. The novel represents Harrison's only foray into satire and is his most experimental work. Out of print since its publication in 1938, it recovers Harrison's trenchant and biting commentary on the heated leftist cultural and political debates of the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War." (Book Cover) CONTENTS: Acknowledgements Introduction I. Harrison's Life and Politics II. Harrison's Evolving Modernist Aesthetics III. Textual History IV. The Novel's Reception Bibliography Meet Me On the Barricades Explanatory Notes Hyphenated Line Endings