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An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)

This paper will discuss the historical and social context in which critical commentary relevant to the novel has significance, and then evaluate literary criticism that has developed around An American Tragedy, both at the time of its initial publication and in the current period.

The fact that the novel appears to have been a popular commercial as well as critical success at the time of first publication may seem remarkable given the sundry cultural forces at work on the American landscape in 1925, when it was first written. An American Tragedy was part of what Frederick Lewis Allen describes as the mid-twenties "revolt of the highbrows" against a "middle class majority [that had] turned from persecuting political radicals [during the early-twenties Big Red Scare] to regulating personal conduct" (Allen 189) by way of assorted community-based moral crusades throughout the country. Indeed, An American Tragedy can be seen partly as an attack on a tradition of self-conscious, self-satisfied moralism that was meant to define core American mainstream values during the 1920s.

Eby develops the view that An American Tragedy is a critique of misplaced materialist values. These were articulated systematically in the social science commentary of Dreiser's exact contemporary Thorstein Veblen, whose dissection of American class inequalities entailed the idea that the leisured, society class functioned as models against whom those not of but aspiring to that class would inevitably compare themselves and whom the lower classes would seek to copy in regard to values, tastes, ambitions, and so on. Undoubtedly Dreiser was aware of Veblen's work. Eby's reading of An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie involves a systematic comparison of Veblen's social science ideas and the ideas articulated in the action of Dreiser's work. In An American Tragedy, a profoundly powerful social and economic psychology is at work in which Clyde Griffiths so ineluctabl...

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An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser). (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:17, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711968.html