FAILURE AND THE AMERICAN WRITER by Gavin Jones ( 9781107056671 )

Item Details

Title:

FAILURE AND THE AMERICAN WRITER
A LITERARY HISTORY

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£50.00
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ISBN 10:

1107056675

ISBN 13:

9781107056671

Publisher:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

20 January, 2014

Series:

Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 168

Pages:

201

Description:

By exploring the aberrant literary styles of nineteenth-century American writers, Jones suggests failure is just as important as 'success' in US national experience.

Synopsis:

If America worships success, then why has the nation's literature dwelled obsessively on failure? This book explores encounters with failure by nineteenth-century writers - ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to Mark Twain and Sarah Orne Jewett - whose celebrated works more often struck readers as profoundly messy, flawed and even perverse. Reading textual inconsistency against the backdrop of a turbulent nineteenth century, Gavin Jones describes how the difficulties these writers faced in their faltering search for new styles, coherent characters and satisfactory endings uncovered experiences of blunder and inadequacy hidden in the culture at large. Through Jones's treatment, these American writers emerge as the great theorists of failure who discovered ways to translate their own social insecurities into complex portrayals of a modern self, founded in moral fallibility, precarious knowledge and negative feelings.

Illustrations:

15 b/w illus.

Publication:

Imprint:

Cambridge University Press

Prizes:

Short-listed for PROSE Awards: Literature 2015

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

A MENTAL STATE

AMERICAN HUNGERS