Accident Society : Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became "car accidents" and "industrial accidents." During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own "mutual society." __Accident Society__ reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended—and continues to depend—on the literary production of chance. Arguing That Language And Literature Actively Produced Chance In The Late 19th And Early 20th Centuries By Categorising Injuries And Losses As Innocent Of Design, This Book Reveals The Extent To Which American Collectivity Has Depended On The Literary Production Of Chance. Introduction : Writing The Accident -- The Insurance Of The Real : William Dean Howells -- Aimless Battles : Stephen Crane -- Detecting Absolute Chance : Charles Peirce And Anna Katharine Green -- The Feminization Of Chance : Edith Wharton And Crystal Eastman -- Performing The Accident On Purpose : Theodore Dreiser And James Cain. Jason Puskar. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 227-260) And Index. Underwriting the Accident shows how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels taught Americans to classify a wide range of modern injuries as blameless accidents, which in turn became a powerful rationale for new and more interdependent modes of social organization.