Title: The virtues of the vicious
First published: 1997
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.
Subjects: American Didactic literature, American prose literature, City and town life in literature, Didactic literature, American, Historiography, History and criticism, Influence, Slums, Slums in literature, Social ethics in literature, Spectacular, The, The Spectacular, Slum (Motiv), Vie urbaine, Critique et interprétation, Alltag, Dans la littérature, Roman, How the other half lives (Riis, Jacob A.), Geschichte, Morale sociale, Villes, Littérature didactique, Logement insalubre, Verelendung (Motiv), Littérature américaine, Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.), Histoire et critique, Slum, Maggie, a girl of the streets (Crane, Stephen), Crane, stephen, 1871-1900, American prose literature, history and criticism, Didactic literature, history and criticism, Riis, jacob a. (jacob august), 1849-1914, Iron mines and mining, History
Places: New York, New York (State)
People: Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914), Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PS1449.C85 M334 1997