Failure and the American Writer

A Literary History

By:

Gavin Jones

Format:

Paperback / softback

Series:

Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

Show Hide Adult Content

$68.00

Available from supplier

Usually ships in 3-4 weeks

0 in Trolley

Price Match

Wrap this item as a gift ($5.90) - add a free gift card on the next page

Free Delivery with Primate

Join Now

Free 14 day free trial, cancel anytime.

Buy Now, Pay Later with:

Afterpay is available on orders $100 to $2000 Learn more

6 weekly interest-free payments of $11.33 with Laybuy Learn more

Availability

Delivering to:

Estimated arrival:

Around 7-19 June using International Courier

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.

Author Biography:

Gavin Jones is Professor of English at Stanford University, where he currently serves as department Chair. A former Junior Fellow in Harvard University's Society of Fellows, Jones is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999) and American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in US Literature, 1840–1945 (2007). He has published numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature in journals such as American Literary History, African American Review and New England Quarterly.

Release date NZ

January 20th, 2014

Author

Gavin Jones

Audience

Professional & Vocational

Illustrations

8 Halftones, unspecified; 7 Line drawings, unspecified

Pages

211

Series

Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

Dimensions

152x228x14

ISBN-13

9781107662179

Product ID

21555834

Customer reviews

Nobody has reviewed this product yet. You could be the first!

Write a Review

Marketplace listings

There are no Marketplace listings available for this product currently.
Already own it? Create a free listing and pay just 9% commission when it sells!

Sell Yours Here