American Women Writers and the Nazis
Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford and Hellman

As expatriates in Germany and Austria in the 1930s, Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford and Lillian Hellman saw the rise of Nazi ideology firsthand. In this volume Thomas Austenfeld restores ethics and politics to the central places they held in the lives and work of these women.

Kay Boyle's analysis of the language and cultural expression of occupation, Lillian Hellman's exposure of diplomatic language as furthering war, Katherine Anne Porter's implicit critique of Weimar Germany's class consciousness, and Jean Stafford's searching meditations on guilt and responsibility all argue afresh for the pragmatic goals that fiction and drama can serve in a politically unstable world.