From the Way to Wealth to the Gospel of Wealth: The Transformation of the Concept of Success in American Literature from Benjamin Franklin to Theodore Dreiser

Author: 

Koseman, Zennure

Credentials: 

Professor of English, Department of Western Languages and Literatures, Inonu University, Ph.D, Hacettepe University, American Culture and Literature

This research monograph based on an extensive and original investigation of American literary sources and literary history and it discusses the extraordinary change that occurred in American literature and life based due to the shifting definition and framework of the concept of success from Franklin's ethically framed view of the citizen as a progressive member of an evolving exciting late colonial-early republican society through the redefinition of success and wealth into merciless individualism , money drenched respectability and amorality following the Civil War an culminating in Dreiser's great creative works such as The Titian , Jennie Gerhardt, Sister Carrie and The Financier.

Market: 
American literature 1770 - 1918, the concept of Success in American Literature, Ethics and Marginalization, The Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, Horatio Alger and the concept of luck and pluck, H.L.Mencken and literary criticism, Theodore Dreiser, The Civil War in American Literary Imagination and the Remaking of the South, Self Reliance and Moral Demise of fictional protagonists, Women and Wealth as means of social acceptance
Release Date: 
8/15/2012
Copyright: 
2013
ISBN: 
Cloth: 978-1-936320-52-3
Price: 
$64.95
Trim Size: 
6x9
Pages: 
174
Illustrations: 
Yes
Publisher: 

ACADEMICA PRESS
1727 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 507
Washington, DC 20036