Accident society : fiction, collectivity, and the production of chance / Jason Puskar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Puskar, Jason Robert.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Chance in literature.

Realism in literature.

Literature and society--United States--History--19th century.

Literature and society.

Literature and society--United States--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (280 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction : writing the accident

The insurance of the real : William Dean Howells

Aimless battles : Stephen Crane

Detecting "absolute chance" : Charles Peirce, Anna Katharine Green

The feminization of chance : Edith Wharton, Crystal Eastman

Performing the accident on purpose : Theodore Dreiser, James Cain.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780804778459

0804778450

OCLC:

767502196