American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.s. Literature, 1840-1945

by Jones, Gavin

• ISBN13: 9781400831913
• ISBN10: 1400831911
• Copyright: 2009-11-04
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

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 forAmerican 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 Hungersmasterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
Introduction: The Problem of Poverty in Literary Criticism	p. 1
Beggaring Description: Herman Melville and Antebellum Poverty Discourse	p. 21
Paradigms of Poverty and Pauperism	p. 23
Literary Uses and Abuses of Poverty	p. 28
The Ambivalence of Thoreau and Davis	p. 32
Redburn and Israel Potter: Transatlantic Counterparts	p. 38
Melville's Sketches of the Mid-1850s	p. 46
Poor Pierre	p. 52
Problems of Need in The Confidence-Man	p. 59
Being Poor in the Progressive Era: Dreiser and Wharton on the Pauper Problem	p. 62
Writing Poverty	p. 65
The Persistence of Pauperism	p. 72
What's the Matter with Hurstwood?	p. 76
The Class That Drifts	p. 80
Fear of Falling	p. 85
The Feminization of Poverty	p. 88
Poor Lily	p. 92
Class and Gender	p. 100
The Depression in Black and White: Agee, Wright, and the Aesthetics of Damage	p. 106
Understanding the Depression	p. 110
Agee's Uncertainty	p. 116
Damage and Disadvantage	p. 120
The Beauty and Erotics of Poverty	p. 124
Race, Class, and Poor Richard	p. 129
American Hunger	p. 139
Delinquent Identity	p. 144
Conclusion	p. 148
Notes	p. 155
Works Cited	p. 201
Index	p. 219
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