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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation

Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation

Seaber, Luke

Hardcover

Series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 3319509616
ISBN13: 9783319509617
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: May 16 2017
Pages: 274
Weight: 1.08
Height: 0.69 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
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.

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