Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781107056671)

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: Gavin Jones
ISBN-10: 1107056675
ISBN-13: 9781107056671
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/20/2014
Pages: 201
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d
Award: PROSE - Honorable Mention

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 11/07/2014 pg. 17