Gavin Jones, Failure and the American Writer, A Literary History. New York, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, 2014

Gavin Jones aptly chose “A Literary History” as a subtitle to his Failure and the American Writer, published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press. He indeed proposes a series of insightful readings of the writings of a number of canonical American authors, from Washington Irving to Henry Adams, using the idea of “failure” as a unifying theme and guideline to provide the reader with an original presentation of nineteenth-century literature. Gavin Jones often focuses on the editorial history o...