The virtues of the vicious
Subtitle: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the spectacle of the slum
By: Keith Gandal.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 206
Subjects: Crane, Stephen, 1871-1900.; Riis, Jacob A. 1849-1914.; Riis, Jacob A. 1849-1914 -- Influence.; American prose literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Didactic literature, American -- History and criticism.; Slums -- New York (State) -- New York -- Historiography.; City and town life in literature.; Social ethics in literature.; Slums in literature.; Spectacular, The.
Description: In this compelling work, Keith Gandal reveals how the slum in nineteenth-century America, long a topic for sober moral analysis, became in the 1890s an unprecedented source of spectacle, captured in novels, newspapers, documentary accounts, and photographs. Reflecting a change in the middle-class vision of the poor, the slum no longer drew attention simply as a problem of social conditions and vice but emerged as a subject for aesthetic, ethnographic, and psychological description.

From this period dates the fascination with the "colorful" alternative customs and ethics of slum residents, and an emphasis on nurturing their self-steem. Middle-class portrayals of slum life as "strange and dangerous" formed part of a broad turn-of-the-century quest for masculinity, Gandal argues, a response to a sentimental Victorian respectability perceived as stifling.

These changes in middle-class styles for representing the urban poor signalled a transformation in middle-class ethics and a reconception of subjectivity.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-200) and index.