AMERICAN HUNGERS by Gavin Jones ( 9780691127538 ) - Books & Audio Books at Pickabook.co.uk

Item Details

Title:

AMERICAN HUNGERS
THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY IN U.S. LITERATURE, 1840-1945

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£36.95
We currently do not stock this item, please contact the publisher directly for further information.

ISBN 10:

0691127530

ISBN 13:

9780691127538

Publisher:

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

3 December, 2007

Series:

20/21

Pages:

272

Description:

Argues that poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite the interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. This work uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression.

Synopsis:

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.

Illustrations:

12 halftones.

Publication:

Imprint:

Princeton University Press

Returns:

Non-returnable

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