| Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation Softcover Repri Edition Contributor(s): Seaber, Luke (Author) |
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ISBN: 3319845322 ISBN-13: 9783319845326 Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan OUR PRICE: $94.99 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: July 2018 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh - Literary Criticism | Modern - 19th Century - Literary Criticism | Modern - 20th Century |
| Dewey: 300.1 |
| Series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing |
| Physical Information: 0.6" H x 5.83" W x 8.27" (0.75 lbs) 274 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Chronological Period - 20th Century - Cultural Region - British Isles |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This book is the first full critical history of incognito social investigation texts - in other words, works detailing their authors' experiences whilst pretending to be poor. The most famous example is Down and Out in Paris and London, but there has been a vast array of other works in the genre since it was created in 1866 by James Greenwood's 'A Night in a Workhouse'. It draws up a classification of incognito social investigation texts, dividing them into four subtypes. The first comprises those texts following most narrowly in James Greenwood's footsteps, taking the extreme poor as their object of study. The next is the investigation of poverty through walking, for pedestrianism and poverty are fascinatingly linked. The third is that of people looking at relative poverty rather than absolute, where authors take on badly-paid work in order to report on it, which is when incognito social investigation becomes very much something carried out by women. We end looking at those incognito social investigators who settled in the areas they explored. Not only will this book recover the history of a genre that has long been ignored, however, but it will also offer significant close reading of many of the texts that it places within the tradition(s) it discovers. |