Failure and the American Writer
A Literary History
$30.99 (P)
Part of Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
- Author: Gavin Jones, Stanford University, California
- Date Published: January 2014
- availability: Available
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9781107662179
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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.
Read more- Uncovers how failure is just as important as 'success' in US national experience
- Offers a new theory of failure as a fundamental and complex human experience
- Provides a fresh account of the distinctive formal qualities of nineteenth-century American literature
Awards
- Honourable Mention, 2015 PROSE Award for Literature
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×Product details
- Date Published: January 2014
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9781107662179
- length: 211 pages
- dimensions: 228 x 152 x 14 mm
- weight: 0.34kg
- contains: 15 b/w illus.
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
Introduction: Henry Adams and the catastrophic century
1. Falling for Edgar Allan Poe
2. Herman Melville in the doldrums
3. The disappointments of Henry David Thoreau
4. Stephen Crane's fake war
5. The double failure of Mark Twain
6. Sarah Orne Jewett falling short
7. The faltering style of Henry James
Conclusion.
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