Danger and vulnerability in nineteenth-century American literature: crash and burn

Description

"This book reads nineteenth-century American literature in the context of emerging technologies, laws, and industries. By engaging ideas about risk and vulnerability, literature showed a shift in America's cultural ethos from lauding autonomy and mastery to promoting a sympathetic state and encouraging new forms of cultural recompense"-- Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth Century American Literature; or, Crash and Burn American invites readers to examine the "threat horizon" through its nascent expression in literary and cultural history. Against the emerging rhetoric of danger in the long nineteenth century, this book examines how a vocabulary of vulnerability in the American imaginary promoted the causes of the structurally disempowered in new and surprising ways, often seizing vulnerability as the grounds for progressive insight. The texts at the heart of this study, from nineteenth-century sensation novels to early twentieth-century journalistic fiction, imagine spectacular collisions, terrifying conflagrations, and all manner of catastrophe, social, political, and environmental. Together they write against illusions of inviolability in a growing technological and managerial culture, and they imagine how the recognition of universal vulnerability may challenge normative representations of social, political, and economic marginality.--Publisher website.  Read more... Abstract: This book reads nineteenth-century American literature in the context of emerging technologies, laws, and industries. By engaging ideas about risk and vulnerability, literature showed a shift in America's cultural ethos from lauding autonomy and mastery to promoting a sympathetic state and encouraging new forms of cultural recompense.  Read more... Content: Introduction: Crash and burn -- A "damsel-errant in quest of adventures": E.D.E.N. Southworth, sensation, and the law -- Crash lit: trains, pains, and automobiles -- "Hurts that will not heal": Theodore Dreiser, masculinity, and railroad labor -- Burning down the house: comets, hurricanes, and the fire to come -- The tremblor: disaster and vulnerability, San Francisco, 1906.