Special Issue of American Literature: How Literature Understands Poverty
This special issue examines the role of literature and criticism in addressing poverty and dispossession. In a 2009 Inside Higher Ed op-ed, Keith Gandal predicted that the economic crisis would lead to literary studies finally putting “poverty near the top of the agenda and the center of the field.” Ten years later, poverty has become a focus of scholarship in the social sciences, particularly geography, anthropology, sociology, and critical legal studies. Yet the topic remains stubbornly marginal to literary studies, even though qualitative social scientific methods have been taken up in the discipline as never before.