The Heart of Revolution: The Radical Life and Novels of Olive Dargan by Kathy Cantley Ackerman

From the publisher: "Despite the timeless themes of Olive Tilford Dargan’s work and the acclaim she earned with her novels Call Home the Heart (1932) and A Stone Came Rolling (1935), the author, who published her best-known works under the pseudonym Fielding Burke, has been largely forgotten by the American literary establishment. In this first book-length study of Dargan’s life and work, Kathy Cantley Ackerman poses these questions: Why did Dargan’s proletarian and feminist writings fall out of public favor when the literary climate changed in the 1940s, and what are the issues raised in and by her work that today’s readers should reconsider?The Heart of Revolution combines biography and history with a critical reading of Dargan’s work. Ackerman pays close attention to the proletarian, feminist, and racial issues in the novels; she then examines the ways these issues intersect in the southern Appalachian and Piedmont regions. Dargan’s aesthetic, articulated in her depiction of the sou