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Book Cover
E-book
Author Puskar, Jason

Title Accident Society : Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance
Published Palo Alto : Stanford University Press, 2012

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Description 1 online resource (280 pages)
Contents Acknowledgments; Introduction: Writing the Accident; 1. The Insurance of the Real: William Dean Howells; 2. Aimless Battles: Stephen Crane; 3. Detecting "Absolute Chance" : Charles Peirce and Anna Katharine Green; 4. The Feminization of Chance: Edith Wharton and Crystal Eastman; 5. Performing the Accident on Purpose: Theodore Dreiser and James Cain; Notes; Index
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 m
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Chance in literature.
Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 19th century
Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Realism in literature.
American fiction
Chance in literature
Literature and society
Realism in literature
United States
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780804778459
0804778450