Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in
American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied
its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right,
despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the
marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers,
in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the
poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression.
Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith
Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts,
Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen
short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically
and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They
confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving
language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers,
and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society.
Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates
about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature
becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition
that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories
of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social
difference.
Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers
masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
