Loafers in American literary history

 

Beginning with Irving's Rip Van Winkle, the very first loafer in American literature, the character of loafer, or the image of it, which was most famously represented by Whitman himself, has been existed and pointed out by literary critics of Early and 19th-century American literature. Yet the transition of the loafers when the nation went into the age of urbanization has not been focused very much--where did all of them go? If they simply disappeared in the time of modernization, how and why did the phenomenon happen? Or, if we can say the form of the loafers was transformed into the figures of the low social class in the 20th century, such as criminals or prostitutes, what would be the process of it? If it is, how does the 20th-century crime fiction relate to the image of loafers in representing them? Can we connect the modern crime fiction and the 19th-century loafers, possibly as a form of protesting against the national/global ideology of capitalist work ethic, such as industrialism and moral purity as the loafers did in the 19th century?