Always with us: Images of poverty in American literature.
Item
-
Title
-
Always with us: Images of poverty in American literature.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3144114
-
identifier
-
3144114
-
Creator
-
Loonam, John P.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: William Kelly
-
Date
-
2004
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, American | History, United States
-
Abstract
-
Prosperity has long been viewed as a defining American condition. John Winthrop, Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson made the rise from subsistence to prosperity a centerpiece in the transformation from European to American. As the American economy grew, this insistence on inevitable prosperity became increasingly problematic.;Chapter I examines how the Crash of 1837 forced American writers to confront the reality of poverty. In The Wide, Wide World, Susan Warner puts her heroine through many of the situations that were forcing children into poverty without letting her suffer any deprivation. George Lippard includes poverty in his portrait of America, but leads his virtuous poor to new lives of prosperity in an Edenic west. Herman Melville is unique in his insistence on the reality of poverty in the young republic. The collapse of his career demonstrates the importance of the ideology of inevitable prosperity.;Chapter II explores the realistic depictions of urban life that become a focus of American culture in the late Nineteenth-Century. Jacob Riis used both prose and photography to create a portrait of the immigrant slum dwellers as an exotically different "other half," while simultaneously focussing attention on the similarities between the aspirations of the poor and of his audience. Stephen Crane used his portraits of the poor to critique the values of the middle class. Theodore Dreiser illustrated the amoral, random nature of an economy devoid of values other than pleasure.;Chapter III examines the changes to the ideology of prosperity brought about by The Great Depression. Henry Roth's modernism infuses David Schearl with a rich inner life, making it impossible to define him simply by his socio-economic conditions. John Steinbeck drew on the earnest photography of Dorothea Lange to portray the Joads as an exemplary American family, with the values of yeoman husbandry now tied to their poverty and homelessness.;The cultural portrait of poverty has thus evolved---a condition once seen as essentially un-American becomes a trait that authenticates a character's status as American.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
