The book analyzes American literature about middle or upper class characters who voluntarily descend the class ranks to experience "vital contact" by living or associating, temporarily, with the poor. The motivations of these characters--and historical figures such as John Reed and Walter Wyckoff--range from straightforward bohemian slumming among the "exotics" to more complex and psychologically wrought investigations of cross-class empathy. The study begins by charting downclasing processes in works of canonical nineteenth-century authors, including Melville, Hawthorne, James, Howells and...
The book analyzes American literature about middle or upper class characters who voluntarily descend the class ranks to experience "vital contact" by ...
Ernest Poole's bestselling, muckraking classic about the plight of the worker.
The best-known novel by the winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Ernest Poole's The Harbor was published in 1915 to instant acclaim and remains his most important book. At the heart of the story is Billy, an aspiring writer who struggles to reconcile his sympathy for workers with his middle-class allegiance to capitalist progress. As Billy comes of age on the New York waterfront, an eyewitness to explosive tensions between labor and capital that culminate in a violent strike, he...
Ernest Poole's bestselling, muckraking classic about the plight of the worker.
The best-known novel by the winner of the first Pulit...
"An insightful study of how Thoreau's profession as a surveyor impacts his environmental sensibility and informs his literary works; further, Chura shows that the manuscript surveys and corresponding field notes are themselves worthy of literary analysis. "--Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, coeditor of More Day to Dawn: Thoreau s Walden for the Twenty-first Century Chura's thorough understanding of the cultural import and physical practice of 19th-century surveying provides a fresh and interesting perspective on Thoreau's life and works. . . . .He combines a spry writing style with...
"An insightful study of how Thoreau's profession as a surveyor impacts his environmental sensibility and informs his literary works; further, Chura...
