A01=Patrick Chura
amalgamation
American social history
ape
Author_Patrick Chura
Blithedale Romance
Category=D
Category=DS
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
class consciousness in American novels
class mobility
coal
Coal War
cross-class empathy
Dos Passos
Dubious Battle
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Genteel Radical
hairy
Hairy Ape
house
hull
Hull House
IWW Leader
John Dos Passos
John Reed
John Reed Club
Ju Liet
King Coal
labor movement literature
literary realism
Ludlow Massacre
Mabel Dodge
Mary French
Mike Gold
pageant
paterson
Paterson Pageant
Paterson Strike
progressive era fiction
Sacco Vanzetti Case
Settlement Worker
social
Stunt Reporter
Veiled Lady
Vital Contact
wars
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9780415976145
- Weight: 620g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 16 Sep 2005
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The book analyzes American literature about middle or upper class characters who voluntarily descend the class ranks to experience vital contact by living or associating, temporarily, with the poor. The motivations of these characters--and historical figures such as John Reed and Walter Wyckoff--range from straightforward bohemian slumming among the exotics to more complex and psychologically wrought investigations of cross-class empathy. The study begins by charting downclasing processes in works of canonical nineteenth-century authors, including Melville, Hawthorne, James, Howells and Jewett. It then undertakes an original analysis of John Reed's involvement with the 1913 Paterson silk workers' strike as a context for understanding Ernest Poole's (now forgotten, but then best-selling) fictionalization of the strike in his novel, The Harbor . In other richly historicized chapters, it analyzes distillations of class radicalism in several works by Upton Sinclair, in the early drama of Eugene O'Neill, and in feminist novels of the 1910s by Elia Peattie and Clara Laughlin. The concluding chapter looks at sophisticated treatments of vital contact in fiction of the 1930s by Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Richard Wright. The book provides Americanists with important new ways of thinking about various forms of class identification as they developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
