In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, Julian Murphet examines how dramatists and prose writers at the turn of the twentieth century experimented with new forms of modern character. Old truisms of character such as consistency, depth, and verisimilitude are eschewed in favour of inconsistency, bad faith, and fragmentation.

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.

Illuminates modern consumer culture and its challenges to American identity and values in two classic novels

From Herman Melville’s claim that “failure is the true test of greatness” to Henry Adams’s self-identification with the “mortifying failure in [his] long education” and William Faulkner’s eagerness to be judged by his “splendid failure to do the impossible,” the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression. David Ball’s magisterial study addresses the fundamental questions of language, meaning, and authority that run counter to well-rehearsed claims of American innocence and positivity, beginning with the American Renaissance and extending into modernist and contemporary literature. The rhetoric of failure was used at various times to engage artistic ambition, the arrival of advanced capitalism, and a rapidly changing culture, not to mention sheer exhaustion. False Starts locates a lively narrative running through American literature that consequently queries assumptions about the development of modernism in the United States.

Owing to the diverse research interests of the contributors, this collection of essays offers a varied picture of the current approaches to Anglo-American literature and culture, and points to the need for a deeper understanding of current cultural, economic and social processes in the globalizing and globalized culture of the West. Because “crisis” seems to be the key word of contemporary Western culture, the first part of the book, titled “In the Face of Crises”, explores the implicit or explicit idea of a crisis between the real and the simulated, suggesting that one of the major issues for the contemporary man is how to deal with the virtual or with the “absence of the real”. Our fast-paced, technology-laden and materialist-oriented existence brings about the need to rethink our human identity, putting into perspective our relationship to technology, the impact of capitalist economy and colonial past, as well as consequences of constant warfare. The second part of the book, “New Perspectives on Literary Genres”, analyzes forms, topics and styles in literary texts belonging to specific, sometimes marginalized, genres. Literary analyses in this section also touch upon the idea of crisis: be it the crisis of understanding and redefining a particular genre, or a crisis that is inherent in the controversial topic or form of the text. As a reaction to recent allegations concerning the crisis of humanities as “non-profitable”, this book shows that humanist research is indispensable and crucial for understanding the human condition, making this book a relevant addition to the contemporary discussion of literature and culture.