The virtues of the vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the spectacle of the slum

In this compelling work, Keith Gandal reveals how the slum in nineteenth-century America, long a topic for sober moral analysis, became in the 1890s an unprecedented source of spectacle, captured in novels, newspapers, documentary accounts, and photographs. Reflecting a change in the middle-class vi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Gandal, Keith (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: New York [u.a.] Oxford Univ. Press 1997
Subjects:
Online Access:Inhaltsverzeichnis
Summary:In this compelling work, Keith Gandal reveals how the slum in nineteenth-century America, long a topic for sober moral analysis, became in the 1890s an unprecedented source of spectacle, captured in novels, newspapers, documentary accounts, and photographs. Reflecting a change in the middle-class vision of the poor, the slum no longer drew attention simply as a problem of social conditions and vice but emerged as a subject for aesthetic, ethnographic, and psychological description. From this period dates the fascination with the "colorful" alternative customs and ethics of slum residents, and an emphasis on nurturing their self-steem. Middle-class portrayals of slum life as "strange and dangerous" formed part of a broad turn-of-the-century quest for masculinity, Gandal argues, a response to a sentimental Victorian respectability perceived as stifling. These changes in middle-class styles for representing the urban poor signalled a transformation in middle-class ethics and a reconception of subjectivity.
Physical Description:VIII, 206 S. Ill.
ISBN:0195110633

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