In the unstable economy of the nineteenth-century, few Americans could feel secure. Paper money made values less tangible, while a series of financial manias, panics, and depressions clouded everyday life with uncertainty and risk. In this groundbreaking study, Andrew Lawson traces the origins of American realism to a new structure of feeling: the desire of embattled and aspiring middle class for a more solid and durable reality. The story begins with New England authors Susan Warner and Rose Terry Cooke, whose gentry-class families became insolvent in the wake of the 1837 Panic, and moves to the western frontier, where the early careers of Rebecca Harding Davis and William Dean Howells were shaped by a constant struggle for social position and financial security. We see how the pull of downward social mobility affected even the outwardly successful, bourgeois family of Henry James in New York, while the drought-stricken wheat fields of Iowa and South Dakota produced the most militant American realist, Hamlin Garland. For these writers, realism offered to stabilize an uncertain world by capturing it with a new sharpness and accuracy. It also revealed a new cast of social actors-factory workers, slaves, farm laborers, the disabled, and the homeless, all victims of an unregulated market. Combining economic history and literary analysis to powerful effect, Downwardly Mobile shows how the fluctuating fortunes of the American middle class forced the emergence of a new kind of literature, while posing difficult political choices about how the middle class might remedy its precarious condition.
Downwardly Mobile for Conscience Sake
Up the Financial Ladder in a Downwardly Mobile Society
Engaging and eye-opening, Privilege Lost brings to life the stories of the downwardly mobile and highlights what they reveal about class, privilege, and American family life.
Suddenly Poor Book: The Novice Pauper's Guide to the Good Life
Suddenly Poor!: A Guide for the Downwardly Mobile
This is a close-up view of the dark (and now largely neglected) side of the 1980s, also of a subculture which lives just below the surface of middle-class American life and which shares neither in its affluence nor its aspirations.
Drawing upon ten years of longitudinal interviews with over 100 American youth, this book shows which upper-middle-class youth are most likely to fall, how they fall, and why they do not see it coming.
" Philip Yancy In this short work, Henri Nouwen offers a penetrating reflection on the challenge of the spiritual life, especially the call to imitate Christ's example of "downward mobility.
Downwardly Mobile is a book about living life on the road. It is the story of what happened when Ray and Alison Canham tested their 6 month old marriage by resigning from good jobs and swapping their suburban house for a motorhome.
Faithfully following the original, Pat the Money also features Paul and Judy, here cast as baby boomers, born before 1960, "able to do lots of things." In the original, "You can do lots of things, too.