چکیده:
This paper focuses on a number of American stories which helped educate people and bring about legal or social change. There are many stories which caused major or minor legal and political change، particularly، in the United States. Some of them are written by Herman Melville، Harriet Beecher Stowe، Upton Sinclair and Sidney Kingsley. After the publication of White Jacket by Melville the novel was distributed to the U.S. Senate which consequently outlawed flogging on naval vessels. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is another notable example of a literary text which triggered an enormous social change in America; in this case، the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Sinclair’s The Jungle was influential in obtaining passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Kingsley’s play، Dead End raised awareness about poverty and the inadequacy of housing in the slums of New York City and was responsible for the Wagner Housing Bill which was passed by the U.S. Congress to provide financial assistance to the States and political subdivisions for the elimination of unsafe and unsanitary housing conditions. There are many such stories which helped ameliorate American society and this paper will discuss these works and their social and political backgrounds.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Michael Hanne (1994) opened his book The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change with a more specific question than Manguel’s, asking the question, "Can a novel start a war, free serfs, break up marriages, drive readers to suicide, close factories, bring about a law change, swing an election, or serve as a weapon in a national or international struggle?
There are many stories which caused various social, legal and political changes, particularly, in the United States and this paper is an attempt to bring some of them together in a socio-political reading to show how, to use Jean-Paul Sartre’s words in What Is Literature (1947), writers completely commit themselves in their works, "not in an abjectly passive role" by representing their "vices" and "weaknesses, but as a resolute will and as a choice, as this total enterprise of living that each one of us is" (2001, p.
Despite the fact that reforming stories first emerged in countries like Russia and Britain, they became very popular in the United States, particularly, in the 19th and 20th centuries when American writers such as Melville, Stowe, Sinclair and Kingsley, to name but a few, wrote stories which eventually helped cause major and minor social and political changes by raising awareness about the social problems of their time.
Melville called "the public attention to the indescribable abominations of naval life, reeking with the rankest corruption, cruelty, and blood … vividly portraying scenes of which he was constant witness, and in many instances suggesting a judicious remedy for the evils which he exhibits" (White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War, 2011, para.