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Author: Gavin Jones
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691143316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
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.
Author: Gavin Jones
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691143316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book
Book Description
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.
Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062041509
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 140
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Book Description
The compelling continuation of Richard Wright's great autobiographical work, Black Boy Anyone who has read Richard Wright's Black Boy knows it to be one of the great American autobiographies. Covering Wright's early life in the South, the book concludes with his departure in 1934 for a new life in the North. American Hunger (first published more than thirty years after the appearance of Black Boy) is the continuation of that story. A vital, richly anecdotal work, American Hunger treats with feeling and often with wry humor Wright's struggle to make his way in the North—in Chicago—as a store clerk, dishwasher, and eventually as a writer. He deals movingly with his early days in the Communist Party and with his attempts to keep his integrity in the face of Party demands that he subordinate his artistic goals to its needs. And he recounts with a mixture of pain and irony his break with the Party and the tortured period of ostracism that followed. There is an unsettling and totally frank personal story here, and a lot of raw social history as well.
Author: Andrew Fisher
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535165
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
How to focus anti-hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality. Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an economic emergency. The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity. This was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the “emergency food system” became an industry. In Big Hunger, Andrew Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new vision for the anti-hunger movement. From one perspective, anti-hunger leaders have been extraordinarily effective. Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed. But anti-hunger advocates are missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven by low wages. Reliant on corporate donations of food and money, anti-hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases. They have become part of a “hunger industrial complex” that seems as self-perpetuating as the more famous military-industrial complex. Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.
Author: Eli Saslow
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101873892
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 101
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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting In this Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow traveled across the country over the course of a year—from Florida and Texas to Rhode Island and Tennessee—to examine the personal and political implications and repercussions of America's growing food stamp program. Saslow shows us the extraordinary impact the arrival of food stamps has each month on a small town's struggling economy, the difficult choices our representatives face in implementing this $78-billion program affecting millions of Americans, and the challenges American families, senior citizens, and children encounter every day in ensuring they have enough, and sometimes even anything to eat. These unsettling and eye-opening stories make for required reading, providing nuance and understanding to the complex matters of American poverty. An eBook short.
Author: Gavin Jones
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
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.
Author: David Cates
Publisher: Summit Books
ISBN: 9780671738174
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Jack Dempsey Cliff travels to Kodiak, Alaska, in search of the father who had walked out when Jack was just a baby, but what he finds instead is a disturbing and desperate glimpse at humanity though the eyes of the strangers he meets in barrooms
Author: Peter K. Eisinger
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 9780815791249
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Cheap, plentiful food is an American tradition. We spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any other nation. We feed much of the world with our surpluses. Consumers, retailers, and restaurants throw away one-quarter of our food stock every year. And yet data collected by the federal government show that almost 12 percent of American households either suffer from hunger or worry about going hungry. Why are so many Americans afflicted with "food insecurity" during such prosperous times? According to this book, it's not simply an artifact of poverty: even most of the poorest homes have access to adequate food. Nor is it indifference to their plight or a lack of ways to help: Americans strongly support government food assistance, and there are a host of public and private programs devoted to feeding the hungry. Peter Eisinger seeks to unravel the puzzle of America's hunger and asserts that it is a problem that can be solved. He believes that the perception of hunger and responses to it emerge from a complex, intellectual, political, and social context. He begins by looking for a meaningful definition of hunger, then examines the structure and funding of government food assistance programs, the roles of Congress and community interest groups, and the contributions of volunteer organizations. He concludes by offering ideas to reduce the nation's perplexing hunger problem, based on creating stronger partnerships between public and private food programs.
Author: Aaron Ansell
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469613980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
When Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil's Workers' Party soared to power in 2003, he promised to end hunger in the nation. In a vivid ethnography with an innovative approach to Brazilian politics, Aaron Ansell assesses President Lula's flagship antipoverty program, Zero Hunger (Fome Zero), focusing on its rollout among agricultural workers in the poor northeastern state of Piaui. Linking the administration's fight against poverty to a more subtle effort to change the region's political culture, Ansell rethinks the nature of patronage and provides a novel perspective on the state under Workers' Party rule. Aiming to strengthen democratic processes, frontline officials attempted to dismantle the long-standing patron-client relationships--Ansell identifies them as "intimate hierarchies--that bound poor people to local elites. Illuminating the symbolic techniques by which officials attempted to influence Zero Hunger beneficiaries' attitudes toward power, class, history, and ethnic identity, Ansell shows how the assault on patronage increased political awareness but also confused and alienated the program's participants. He suggests that, instead of condemning patronage, policymakers should harness the emotional energy of intimate hierarchies to better facilitate the participation of all citizens in political and economic development.
Author: Andrew Warnes
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
African American writers have consistently drawn connections between hunger and illiteracy, and by extension between food and reading. This book investigates the juxtaposition of mulnutrition and spectacular food abundance as a key trope of African American writing.
Author: Michael L. Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 564
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Book Description
Americans have had an enduring yet ambivalent obsession with the West as both a place and a state of mind. Michael L. Johnson considers how that obsession originated, how it has determined attitudes toward and activities in the West, and how it has changed over the centuries.
