Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478031024)

For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things, Lennard J. Davis labels this genre "poornography"--distorted narratives of poverty written by and for the middle and upper classes. Davis shows how poornography creates harmful and dangerous stereotypes that build barriers to social justice and change. To remedy this, Davis argues, poor people should write realistic depictions of themselves but because of representational inequality they cannot. Given the obstacles of the poor accessing the means of publication, Davis suggests that the work should, at least for now, be done by "transclass" writers who were once poor and who can accurately represent poverty without relying on stereotypes and clichés. Only then can the lived experience of poverty be more fully realized.

Author: Lennard J. Davis
ISBN-10: 1478031026
ISBN-13: 9781478031024
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/15/2024
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.98lbs