Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It
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- Synopsis
- For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things, Lennard J. Davis labels this genre “poornography”: distorted narratives of poverty written by and for the middle and upper classes. Davis shows how poornography creates harmful and dangerous stereotypes that build barriers to social justice and change. To remedy this, Davis argues, poor people should write realistic depictions of themselves, but because of representational inequality they cannot. Given the obstacles to the poor accessing the means of publication, Davis suggests that the work should, at least for now, be done by “transclass” writers who were once poor and who can accurately represent poverty without relying on stereotypes and clichés. Only then can the lived experience of poverty be more fully realized.
- Copyright:
- 2024
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9781478031024
- Related ISBNs:
- 9781478026747
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
- Date of Addition:
- 11/15/24
- Copyrighted By:
- DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts, Politics and Government
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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