Failure and the American Writer
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 05 June 2014
- 20 January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781107297326
- 9781107056671
- 9781107662179
- Dimensions:
- (228 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.46kg, 201 Pages
- Dimensions:
- (228 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.34kg, 211 Pages
- Series:
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (168)
- Subjects:
- Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory
You may already have access via personal or institutional login- Series:
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (168)
- Subjects:
- Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory
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Book description
If America worships success, then why has the nation's literature dwelled obsessively on failure? This book explores encounters with failure by nineteenth-century writers - ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to Mark Twain and Sarah Orne Jewett - whose celebrated works more often struck readers as profoundly messy, flawed and even perverse. Reading textual inconsistency against the backdrop of a turbulent nineteenth century, Gavin Jones describes how the difficulties these writers faced in their faltering search for new styles, coherent characters and satisfactory endings uncovered experiences of blunder and inadequacy hidden in the culture at large. Through Jones's treatment, these American writers emerge as the great theorists of failure who discovered ways to translate their own social insecurities into complex portrayals of a modern self, founded in moral fallibility, precarious knowledge and negative feelings.
Awards
Honourable Mention, 2015 PROSE Award for Literature
Contents
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