Downwardly Mobile - The Changing Fortunes of American Realism

Combining economic history and literary analysis to powerful effect, Downwardly Mobile shows how the fluctuating fortunes of the American middle class forced the emergence of a new kind of literature, while posing difficult political choices about how the middle class might remedy its precarious condition.

List of contents

• Contents


• Acknowledgements


• Introduction: A Hunger for the Real


• 1. Rose Terry Cooke and the Roots of Realist Taste


• 2. Rebecca Harding Davis and the Failed Genteel Father


• 3. The Artist of the Floating World: William Dean Howells


• 4. The Rentier Aesthetics of Henry James


• 5. Hamlin Garland's Vertical Vision


• Coda: White Collar Blues


• Index

About the author

Andrew Lawson is Principal Lecturer in English at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle.

Summary

Combining economic history and literary analysis to powerful effect, Downwardly Mobile shows how the fluctuating fortunes of the American middle class forced the emergence of a new kind of literature, while posing difficult political choices about how the middle class might remedy its precarious condition.

Additional text

Just as realist writers clarified the real, Lawson clarifies why realism emerged when it did. Like the IMF and its flowchart, or the realist novels themselves, Lawson helps us trace something - the origins of literary realism - that would otherwise remain obscure.

Product details

• Authors: Andrew Lawson, Andrew (Principal Lecturer in English Lite Lawson, Andrew (Principal Lecturer in English Literature Lawson, Andrew Frca Lawson, Lawson Andrew
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 26.06.2014
• EAN: 9780199375028
• ISBN: 978-0-19-937502-8
• No. of pages: 208
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; HISTORY / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies), LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, History of the Americas, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form