Failure and the American Writer by Gavin Jones
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.-
Fictions of Capital
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Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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Sound Recording Technology and American Literature
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Worlds of Hurt
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A Grand Army of Black Men
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T. S. Eliot and Ideology
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Salem Story
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Wallace Stevens
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Tragedy, Affect and Labor in American Literature, 1945–2020
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Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men
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Complicity and the Antebellum Moral Imagination
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The Harlem Renaissance Weekly
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American Narrative Realism
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The Psychopath and the Twentieth-Century American Novel
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Energy and Economy in American Literature
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American Literature and Immediacy
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Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature
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Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 19081934
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Cross-Cultural Reckonings
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A Natural History of Pragmatism
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Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation
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The Logic of Slavery
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Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
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The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures
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Henry James' Last Romance
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Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature
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Multilingual America
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Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms
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The Complicity of Imagination
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The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science
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Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature
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Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation
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Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature
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Time, Tense, and American Literature
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A House Undivided
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Voices of Persuasion
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Conspiracy and Romance
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In Respect to Egotism
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Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America
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Covenant and Republic
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Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 18601930
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Discrepant Engagement
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Reimagining Thoreau
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Poet's Prose
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781107056671 |
| ISBN 10 | 1107056675 |
| Title | Failure and the American Writer |
| Author | Gavin Jones |
| Series | Cambridge Studies In American Literature And Culture |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year published | 2014-01-20 |
| Number of pages | 201 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for PROSE Award for Literature 2015 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |