Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

Puskar, Jason

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0804775354
ISBN13: 9780804775359
Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr
Published: Jan 11 2012
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.10
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became car accidents and industrial accidents. During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own mutual society. Accident Society reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended--and continues to depend--on the literary production of chance.

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All