The naturalistic inner-city novel in America
Subtitle: encounters with the fat man
By: James R. Giles.
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Columbia, S.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 204
Subjects: American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Naturalism in literature.; Inner cities in literature.; Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 20th century.
Description: James R. Giles examines the evolution of a literary tradition born with the rise of America's urban centers - American inner-city naturalism. Giles uses narrative distance to measure the evolution of this literary tradition, and he finds that the slum dweller who was introduced - and held at arm's length - by Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Jack London assumed center stage in the works of such leading twentieth-century writers as Richard Wright, John Rechy, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Giles demonstrates that while Crane, Norris, and London saw the newly emerging ghetto as a source of sensational subject matter, they distanced implied narrators from settings and characters through their use of narrative perspective. He contends that Crane bridges this separation in his 1893 version of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets with the encounter between the grotesque "fat man" and the novel's heroine.

According to Giles, this fat man functions as a startling incarnation of the middle-class writer's fascination with, and fear of, a depraved inner city.

In contrast, Giles argues that the twentieth-century's most memorable American ghetto novels constitute a process of familiarization with, and humanization of, the slum dweller. Giles reveals this merger of narrative voice, character, and setting in his analysis of novels by Michael Gold, Nelson Algren, Hubert Selby, Rechy, Wright, and Oates. Giles concludes with a discussion of the influence these novels have had on more recent explorations of the American inner city.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-197) and index.
Table of contents: title: Tour guides and explorers; title: The fat man finds his voice, part 1 : Michael Gold's Jews without money; title: The fat man finds his voice, part 2 : Richard Wright's Native son; title: Encountering the urban grotesque : Nelson Algren's Man with the golden arm; title: The game of mum as theme and narrative technique in Hubert Selby's Last exit to Brooklyn; title: "Hey, world" : John Rechy's City of night; title: "Miss Oates" and the naturalistic imagination : Joyce Carol Oates's Them; title: Conclusion : the fat man revealed.