Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane

MAGIE: A GIRL OF THE STRETS is an 1893 novella by American author Stephen Crane (1871-1900). The story centers on Maggie, a young girl from the Bowery who is driven to unfortunate circumstances by poverty and solitude. The work was considered risqu by publishers because of its literary realism and strong themes. Crane - who was 22 years old at the time - financed the book's publication himself, although the original 1893 edition was printed under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. After the success of 1895's The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie was reissued in 1896 with considerable changes and re-writing. The story is followed by George's Mother. MAGIE was published during the time of industrialization. The United States, a country shaped by agriculture in the 19th century, became an industrialized nation in the late 1800s. Moreover, an unprecedented influx of immigrants contributed to a boom in population, created bigger cities and a new consumer society. By these developments, progress was linked with poverty, illustrating that the majority of the US population was skeptical about the dependency on the fluctuation of global economy. MAGIE is regarded as the first work of unalloyed naturalism in American fiction.-Milne Holton. According to the naturalistic principles, a character is set into a world where there is no escape from one's biological heredity. Additionally, the circumstances in which a person finds oneself will dominate one's behavior, depriving the individual of responsibility. Although Stephen Crane denied any influence by mile Zola, the creator of Naturalism, on his work, examples in his texts indicate that this American author was inspired by French naturalism.

MAGIE: A GIRL OF THE STRETS is an 1893 novella by American author Stephen Crane (1871-1900). The story centers on Maggie, a young girl from the Bowery who is driven to unfortunate circumstances by poverty and solitude. The work was considered risqu by publishers because of its literary realism and strong themes. Crane - who was 22 years old at the time - financed the book's publication himself, although the original 1893 edition was printed under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. After the success of 1895's The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie was reissued in 1896 with considerable changes and re-writing. The story is followed by George's Mother. MAGIE was published during the time of industrialization. The United States, a country shaped by agriculture in the 19th century, became an industrialized nation in the late 1800s. Moreover, an unprecedented influx of immigrants contributed to a boom in population, created bigger cities and a new consumer society. By these developments, progress was linked with poverty, illustrating that the majority of the US population was skeptical about the dependency on the fluctuation of global economy. MAGIE is regarded as the first work of unalloyed naturalism in American fiction.-Milne Holton. According to the naturalistic principles, a character is set into a world where there is no escape from one's biological heredity. Additionally, the circumstances in which a person finds oneself will dominate one's behavior, depriving the individual of responsibility. Although Stephen Crane denied any influence by mile Zola, the creator of Naturalism, on his work, examples in his texts indicate that this American author was inspired by French naturalism.

“Adrian Hunter’s elegant introduction and judicious selection of essential contextual documents by Crane and his contemporaries make this edition of Maggie wonderfully useful for students, teachers, and interested readers” — Michael Robertson, The College of New Jersey, author of Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature

“Adrian Hunter’s introduction is elegantly written and solidly researched. Many less perceptive critics have tended to apply broad labels to Crane and his work, but Hunter has provided a wonderfully nuanced and sophisticated analysis of this often neglected text and the complex social and historical context from which it emerges. The edition is intelligently organized and carefully annotated; I found the appendices on reform movements and on slum fiction particularly useful.” — Susan Castillo, King’s College, London

STEPHEN CRANE was born, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister, in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871. Writ-ing was an occupation encouraged in Crane's family; two of his brothers became newspapermen. Crane himself began turning out stories at the age of eight. In 1890, following the deaths of both parents, Crane moved to New York City where, to support himself, he worked as a freelance newspaper writer. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which Crane had begun at college, was published pseudonymously in 1893, when he was only twenty-one (Crane had had to borrow money from his brother to pay for its initial printing). Reviewers at the time found Maggie, a penetrating look at New York slum life, too cruel, and the book sold poorly. Crane's first literary success came in 1895 with The Red Badge of Courage.

Crane's travels and experiences during the later 1890s as a war correspondent -- he was sent to the combat areas of Mex-ico, Greece, and Cuba -- furnished rich material for other sto-ries, including The Open Boat (based partly on Crane's own experience of shipwreck off the coast of Florida) and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, whose blend of realism and romanticism earned the praise of William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and other American realists.

Crane also published two volumes of poetry, The Black Rider and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), which dramatized his rebellion against New England Calvinism and conservative evangelical Christianity. Spumed or ignored by the critics of his own country, Crane traveled with his wife-to--be to England, where The Red Badge of Courage was greatly admired, and where he made the acquaintance of such literary giants as Henry James (another American emigre) and Joseph Conrad.

Crane's adventuresome and roving lifestyle seriously under-mined his health; after fruitless efforts to obtain a cure, he died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, on June 5, 1900, at the age of twenty-eight.

Stephen Crane published other novels and several vol-umes of short stories, including George's Mother (1896), The Third Violet (1897), The Monster and Other Stories (1899), and Whilomville Stories (1900).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781551115979
ISBN 10	1551115972
Title	Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Author	Stephen Crane
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Broadview Press Ltd
Year published	2006-09-30
Number of pages	200
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable