A01=Gavin Jones
African Americans
Apathy
Author_Gavin Jones
Black Boy
Brutalization
Capitalism
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Class analysis
Class consciousness
Consciousness
Cornell University Press
Counterculture
Criticism
Cruelty
Culture of poverty
Disease
Disgust
Economic inequality
Edith Wharton
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Erskine Caldwell
Eugenics
Exclusion
Extreme poverty
Granville Hicks
Ideology
Income
Intellectual disability
International Publishers
Isidor Schneider
Jacob Riis
Laziness
Literary criticism
Literature
Lumpenproletariat
Malnutrition
Mental disorder
Narrative
Neglect
Oppression
Pauperism
Pity
Politics
Poverty
Poverty in the United States
Proletarian literature
Psychological trauma
Racism
Sexism
Shame
Sister Carrie
Slavery
Social class
Social death
Social exclusion
Social inequality
Social issue
Social realism
Social theory
Socioeconomics
Sociology
Stephen Crane
Superiority (short story)
Sympathy
The House of Mirth
Theft
Theodore Dreiser
Thought
Underclass
Unemployment
Vulnerability
Working class
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691143316
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 146 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2009
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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".
