The American Vagrant in Literature : : Race, Work and Welfare / / Bryan Yazell.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
• VerfasserIn: Yazell, Bryan ,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.)

Widespread panic once generated by ‘tramps’ produced interdisciplinary and international dialogue on race, work, and welfareComparative study of US and European sources in the area of literature, ethnography and policy makingCreates new framework for interpretating canonical authors and texts, such as John Steinbeck, Jack London, George Orwell and more Refreshes conventional literary periodization by focusing on the long development of vagrancy memoir and tramp writing from late nineteenth centuryThis book argues that the rapid development of anti-vagrancy laws in the late nineteenth century, which were written alongside widespread public fascination with ‘tramps’, facilitated a transatlantic dialogue between sources eager to modernize the state’s ability to describe, catalogue, and manage this roving population. Almost always depicted as white, solitary, and artistic, the tramp character was once a menacing threat to society only to disappear from the public eye by the postwar period. This book brings to light the often-surprising lines of influence between authors, sociologists, and government authorities who alike seized on the social panic around tramping in order to reimagine the relation of work to national citizenship.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Who Was the Tramp? -- Chapter 1 The Internationalism of American Vagrancy: Mark Twain and Josiah Flynt on the Tramp -- Chapter 2 Vagrant Nationalism: Jack London and W. H. Davies on the Super-Tramp -- Chapter 3 Tramps in the Machine: Interwar British Vagrancy -- Chapter 4 Steinbeck’s Migrants: Families on the Move and the Politics of Resource Management -- Epilogue: Tramping’s Afterlife -- Works Cited -- Index