IIARD International Institute of Academic Research and Development

RESEARCH JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES (RJHCS )

E-ISSN 2579-0528
P-ISSN 2695-2467
VOL. 10. NO. 3 2024
DOI: 10.56201/rjhcs.v10.no3.2024.pg18.30

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John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath: A Literary Portrayal of Historical Truth

Aida Thamer Salloom

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Abstract

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is one of the American classics that record a socio-political climate of the American history in 1930s. It succeeds in representing the harshness of the Great Depression, the dust bowl and the subsequent tribulations of West American people and more specifically, the Okies. Retelling the struggles of migrant farmworkers and the severity they encountered throughout their journey from Oklahoma to California, the novel, despite its plethora of areas of investigation, provokes critical awareness when viewed through the lens of New Historical perspectives. As a well-acclaimed literary theory, New Historicism pays considerable attention to the historical period, in which the literary text was created, bearing in mind that the literary work is a reflection of its socio-political context as well as the author's historical consciousness. With regard to the intertextuality between history and literature, the present study seeks to present a panoramic account of the historical accounts of America in the 1930s and the people's miserable migration as they are thoughtfully reinterpreted in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

keywords:

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, New Historicism, the Great Depression and the Okies.

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