Poverty in the United States is something of a heresy. Long associated with Old World want and famine, with the iniquity of a social system based on privilege, and with a religion encouraging ignorance, dependence, and resignation, poverty clashes against an established ideological self-representation of the United States as a land of plenty and equality, affording endless opportunities for upward mobility to all.

A phrase like American Hungers, then, has the force of an oxymoron: adapted from Richard Wright's autobiography, this felicitously bold title installs the harsh reality of hunger at the heart of the nation. Gavin Jones's book examines the cultural and literary explorations of poverty in the United States with an eye both to their diversity and to their national inflection, and consequently their varying degrees of self-aware ideological subversiveness vis-à-vis the national creed. In constant dialogue with a wide array of scholarship, the author attempts to construct poverty as a “category of critical discourse” (xiii) irreducible to categories of “cultural identity” like class, race, and gender. Poverty calls for an “unlocalized critical language” capable of accounting for its complexity as both an objective state of “socioeconomic suffering” (xiv) and a subjective experience creating a psychology and a culture of its own. This psychosocial condition creates aesthetic problems: numbing the intellect and challenging linguistic expression, it produces blanks in representation, or else accounts that easily verge on the sentimental, the condescending, and the sensational – what Melville implacably branded as the “povertiresque.”

One of the most valuable contributions of the book is the way it reconstructs a whole American “discourse of poverty,” focussing on three crucial junctures: the antebellum age, the Progressive era, and the Great Depression. This debate – ranging from celebration to condemnation of the poor, and from socioeconomic critique to ideological maneuvers to salvage the national creed by blaming destitution on moral character, biology, or the self-reproducing power of poverty itself – adds relevant new dimensions to Thoreau and Melville, Dreiser and Wharton, Agee and Wright (not to mention the many authors who receive less extensive treatment). Jones's readings make a convincing case for these writers as consistent and sustained investigators of poverty, showing how they covertly or overtly engage contemporary views, while thoughtfully addressing aesthetic questions of representation.

What is perhaps less convincing in this volume is the extent to which its more general claim – poverty as a needed theoretical and critical category – is actually justified. Challenging and rewarding as it is as a topic, theme, or path of intellectual inquiry and critical interpretation, poverty creates a number of difficulties when taken as a theoretical category. Jones's effort to establish it as an inclusive category transcending any simple causality is predicated on a strategic opposition of poverty to race, gender, and class, defined as discrete cultural and identity formations, rather than as theoretical instruments enabling an overall analysis of social relations and social organization. However, the very structure of the book, as well as its individual case studies, reinscribe class, gender and race as major, albeit not mutually exclusive, determinants of poverty's causes and manifestations: partially contradicting its own claim for an overarching theoretical rubric, the book thus returns the reader to an internally articulated understanding of poverty less as a category per se than as a symptom of diverse forms of social inequality. Poverty is a cross-class and cross-race phenomenon, to be sure, but certainly Lily Bart's fall and Richard Wright's childhood hunger are the result of different social conditions that need to be analyzed individually. In his effort to establish it as a viable theoretical category, the author sometimes risks reifying poverty as a sweeping, transcendent entity, whose shared phenomenology of need threatens to obfuscate rather than reveal the structural differences between social positions.