Keith Gandal's Books

The Virtues of the Vicious

Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum

By: Keith Gandal

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The Virtues of the Vicious

Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum

By: Keith Gandal

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-esteem. 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. Developing a broad cultural context for the 1890s interest in the poor, Gandal also offers close, groundbreaking analysis of two of the period's crucial texts. Looking at Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890), Gandal documents how Riis's use of ethnographic and psychological details challenged traditional moralist accounts and helped to invent a spectacular style of documentation that still frames our approach as well as our solutions to urban problems. Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) pushed ethnographic and psychological analysis even farther, representing a human interiority centered around self-image as opposed to character and exploring not only different customs but a radically different ethics in New York's Bowery--what we would call today a "culture of poverty." Gandal meanwhile demonstrates how both Riis's innovative "touristic" approach and Crane's "bohemianism" bespeak a romanticization of slum life and an emerging middle-class unease with its own values and virility. With framing discussion that relates slum representations of the 1890s to those of today, and featuring a new account of the Progressive Era response to slum life, The Virtues of the Vicious makes fresh, provocative reading for Americanists and those interested in the 1890s, issues of urban representation and reform, and the history of New York City.

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Page Count

217

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0195110633

ISBN 13

9780195110630

Firsthand

How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis While Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things

By: Keith Gandal

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Firsthand

How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis While Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things

By: Keith Gandal

On writing, researching, and tennis

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Page Count

300

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472056956

ISBN 13

9780472056958

The Gun and the Pen

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization

By: Keith Gandal

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The Gun and the Pen

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization

By: Keith Gandal

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner stand as the American voice of the Great War. But was it warfare that drove them to write? Not according to Keith Gandal, who argues that the authors' famous postwar novels were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These 'quintessential' male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command. As a result, Gandal contends, they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the real action. Bringing to light previously unexamined Army records, including new information about the intelligence tests, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the authors' frustrated military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of the unprecedented U.S. mobilization for the Great War, a radical effort to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not to racial difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-a-vis the Army meant an embarrassment before women and an inability to compete successfully in a rising social order, against a new set of people. The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and offers a major revision of our understanding of America's postwar literature.

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Page Count

284

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199744572

ISBN 13

9780199744572

Quantifying the Impact of Technical Barriers to Trade

Can it be Done?

By: Keith Eugene Maskus,John Sullivan Wilson

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Quantifying the Impact of Technical Barriers to Trade

Can it be Done?

By: Keith Eugene Maskus,John Sullivan Wilson

A discussion of the increasingly contentious debates over national regulations of safety and health in the international trade system

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Page Count

270

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472112473

ISBN 13

9780472112470

The Gun and the Pen

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization

By: Keith Gandal

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The Gun and the Pen

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization

By: Keith Gandal

In this book, Keith Gandal contends that 'The Great Gatsby' 'The Sun Also Rises' and 'The Sound and the Fury' were all written by men who were greatly influenced by their shared frustration of not serving in the American military's colossal war effort

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Page Count

271

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199867127

ISBN 13

9780199867127

The Virtues of the Vicious

Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum

By: Keith Gandal

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The Virtues of the Vicious

Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum

By: Keith Gandal

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Page Count

217

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0195110633

ISBN 13

9780195110630

War Isn't the Only Hell

A New Reading of World War I American Literature

By: Keith Gandal

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War Isn't the Only Hell

A New Reading of World War I American Literature

By: Keith Gandal

A vigorous reappraisal of American literature inspired by the First World War. American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and government propaganda. This prevailing reading ignores the US army’s unprecedented attempt during World War I to assign men—except, notoriously, African Americans—to positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while the noncombatant majority of doughboys experienced a different alienation: that of shame. Drawing on military archives, current research by social-military historians, and his own readings of thirteen major writers, Keith Gandal seeks to put American literature written after the Great War in its proper context—as a response to the shocks of war and meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of noncombatant Lost Generation authors Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cummings, and Faulkner addressed—often in coded ways—the noncombatant failure to measure up. Gandal also examines combat-soldier writers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, and Hervey Allen. Their works are considered straight-forward antiwar narratives, but they are in addition shaped by experiences of meritocratic recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men. Gandal furthermore contextualizes the sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Victor Daly, revealing a complex experience of both army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Finally, Gandal explores three women writers—Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte—who saw the war create frontline opportunities for women while allowing them to be arbiters of masculinity at home. Ultimately, War Isn’t the Only Hell shows how American World War I literature registered the profound ways in which new military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.

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Page Count

289

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1421425114

ISBN 13

9781421425115

Cleveland Anonymous

A Novel

By: Keith Gandal

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Cleveland Anonymous

A Novel

By: Keith Gandal

Beset by a severe disability on the day a fire devastates his young life, Sam is miraculously cured twenty years later when his home is destroyed by an earthquake, and setting out in search of his missing foster sister, he encounters a series of fires and a bizarre cast of characters. Original.

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Page Count

305

Publisher

North Atlantic Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1583940626

ISBN 13

9781583940624

Book's by Keith Gandal

The Virtues of the Vicious

The Virtues of the Vicious

Firsthand

Firsthand

The Gun and the Pen

The Gun and the Pen

Quantifying the Impact of Technical Barriers to Trade

Quantifying the Impact of Technical Barriers to Trade

The Gun and the Pen

The Gun and the Pen

The Virtues of the Vicious

The Virtues of the Vicious

War Isn't the Only Hell

War Isn't the Only Hell

Cleveland Anonymous

Cleveland Anonymous

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