American hungers : the problem of poverty in U.S. literature, 1840-1945
著者
書誌事項
American hungers : the problem of poverty in U.S. literature, 1840-1945
（20/21 / Walter Benn Michaels, series editor）
Princeton University Press, c2008
- : pbk
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注記
Includes bibliographical references and index
内容説明・目次
内容説明
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.
目次
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
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