American hungers the problem of poverty in U.S. literature, 1840-1945 - Jones, Gavin Roger (Princeton University Press, 2008)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Cover; Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Preface; INTRODUCTION: The Problem of Poverty in Literary Criticism; ONE: Beggaring Description: Herman Melville and Antebellum Poverty Discourse; TWO: Being Poor in the Progressive Era: Dreiser and Wharton on the Pauper Problem; THREE: The Depression in Black and White: Agee, Wright, and the Aesthetics of Damage; CONCLUSION; Notes; Works Cited; Index
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 hi