A Weapon in the Struggle
The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain
- 256 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
'Andy Croft's amalgam of essays on some of the dimensions of culture pursued and generated by British communists during give decades of this century, from the twenties through to the sixties, makes compulsive reading... a lively and provocative collection.' Tribune For over seventy years, the Communist Party of Great Britain had an extraordinary impact on British cultural life, exercising an influence quite out of proportion to its size or political importance. Many art forms were revitalised, others profoundly changed, new ones established or shaped by groups and individuals associated with the party, who brought to the realm of cultural production – whether in music, film, theatre or literature – a dynamism and vision that helped to lay the foundations for a new radical culture, a progressive avant garde in which the struggle was always to produce a culture for and of the people, in the front line of the battle of ideas. The distinguished contributors to this volume – the first serious study of the subject – draw on new research to recover the fascinating histories of the artists, poets, musicians, film-makers and cultural visionaries of the period, placing them in a broader historical context and providing an invaluable introduction to British social and cultural history in the twentieth century.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 James Barke: A Great- hearted Writer, a Hater of Oppression, a True Scot
- 2 To Disable the Enemy: the Graphic Art of the Three Jameses
- 3 Heirs to the Pageant: Mass Spectacle and the Popular Front
- 4 Notes From the Left: Communism and British Classical Music
- 5 Sylvia Townsend Warner in the 1930s
- 6 An Intellectual Irrelevance? Marxist Literary Criticism in the 1930s
- 7 King Street Blues: Jazz and the Left in Britain in the 1930s-1940s
- 8 The Boys Round the Corner: the Story of Fore Publications
- 9 The Edinburgh People's Festival, 1951
- 10 The World's Ill-Divided : the Communist Party and Progressive Song
- 11 The Sunshine of Socialism: the CPGB and Film in the 1950s
- Afterword
- Notes on Contributors
- Index