Poor Things

“Lennard J. Davis’s Poor Things provocatively argues that those who write about poor people but are not or have not themselves been poor are governed by various tropes and protocols that serve to depict the poor as revolting and ultimately less human than the rich. The implications of the argument go well beyond the nineteenth-century focus that Davis adopts, having resonances for fields such as economics, anthropology, sociology, and others. Poor Things is a masterpiece of intellectual suggestiveness.” - Ato Quayson, Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Stanford University

“Lennard J. Davis has little to no faith in the ability of middle-class writers to write about poor people without relying on stereotypes. Using a personal narrative, so important to working-class academic writing, allows Davis to convincingly argue that a purely structural class critique is insufficient because such critique typically overlooks the realities of the lived experience of poverty. Therein lie the stakes of his book: that novels written by people in poverty can act as a cultural brake on the social dynamics by which the moneyed and the impoverished are, right now, pulled so violently apart.” - Matt Brim, author of Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University

"Whether considering the hypocrisy of 'poornography' or the common limitations of well-meaning characterizations of the impoverished, Davis's range of authentic criticism is impressive. . . . Poor Things provides a deep reflection and the start of a conversation that could go on forever." - Theodore Bain, Journal of American Culture

"Recommended. Graduate students through faculty." - Choice

“The importance of Poor Things has to do with the urgency and starkness of its intervention. . . .  By revealing the limitations of the transclass exception . . . Davis is all the more able to set the stakes of his argument: that novels have the power to do meaningful cultural work, and representational equality—literature written by people in poverty—can act as a cultural brake on the social dynamics by which the moneyed and the impoverished are, right now, pulled so violently apart.”

“Sometimes books can change how readers see the world. After reading Poor Things, for example, academics may never see works about the poor the same. Nor, if you believe Davis, should they.”

"By far the clearest, most persuasive study of the politics of depicting the poor I have had the fortune to read." - Chris A. Chambers, Political Theory