Description

In this book, Gandal reveals how the slum, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, became a source of spectacle as never before (in newspapers, documentary accounts, photographs, and literature), and emerged as a subject for aesthetic, ethnographic, and psychological description. He argues that the development of these new concepts and styles for representing the urban and largely immigrant poor amounted to a revolution in ethics. Gandal provides a unique reading of Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives (1890), the first book in America on the slum to include photographs, and one of the first books to present ethnographic and psychological details that challenge traditional moralist accounts. In addition, Gandal examines Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), which pushed both ethnographic and psychological analysis even further by including profane local vernacular, demonstrating not only different customs, but radically different ethics in the Bowery, and indicating a human interiority that had nothing at all to do with character.

Reviews

"An excellent book that should be welcomed by anyone interested in modern American thought."--Choice

"An important, provocative new perspective on the conjunction of social and literary history, one which will force a major rethinking of the place of realism in the making of modern American culture."--Eric Sundquist, Northwestern University

"Gandal has made an original, compelling case for rereading Riis and Crane as exemplars of a new style of reading, writing, and knowing the slum and the spectator's relation to it."--American Literature

Product Details

224 pages; 5 halftones; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-511063-0ISBN10: 0-19-511063-3

About the Author(s)