American Hungers

The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945
Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-0-691-14331-6
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 248 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 408 g

Reihe: 20/21

Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Gavin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Preface xiii

INTRODUCTION: The Problem of Poverty in Literary Criticism 1

CHAPTER ONE: Beggaring Description: Herman Melville and Antebellum Poverty Discourse 21

Paradigms of Poverty and Pauperism 23

Literary Uses and Abuses of Poverty 28

The Ambivalence of Thoreau and Davis 32

Redburn and Israel Potter: Transatlantic Counterparts 38

Melville's Sketches of the Mid-1850s 46

Poor Pierre 52

Problems of Need in The Confidence-Man 59

CHAPTER TWO: Being Poor in the Progressive Era: Dreiser and Wharton on the Pauper Problem 62

Writing Poverty 65

The Persistence of Pauperism 72

What's the Matter with Hurstwood? 76

The Class That Drifts 80

Fear of Falling 85

The Feminization of Poverty 88

Poor Lily 92

Class and Gender 100

CHAPTER THREE: The Depression in Black and White: Agee, Wright, and the Aesthetics of Damage 106

Understanding the Depression 110

Agee's Uncertainty 116

Damage and Disadvantage 120

The Beauty and Erotics of Poverty 124

Race, Class, and Poor Richard 129

American Hunger 139

Delinquent Identity 144

CONCLUSION 148

Notes 155

Works Cited 201

Index 219

Über Autor(innen)

Jones, Gavin
Gavin Jones is professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of "Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America".