Studies in American Fiction, September 22nd, 2003
Thorstein Veblen began writing The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1895, the year Frank Norris completed drafting his novice work Vandover and the Brute, published posthumously in 1914. Both volumes reflect upon an American economy characterized by industrialization, mass immigration, and selective affluence, and both mock the behavior of the financially secure within that economy. Vandover and the Brute, in fact, reads like an application of Veblen's economic theses to naturalist fiction. In this light, Vandover's fall from leisure-class privilege to working-class drudgery results not from a...
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