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Class and the Making of American Literature

Created Unequal

Edited by Andrew Lawson

To Be Published December 15th 2013 by Routledge – 256 pages

Series: Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

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  • Hardback: $125.00
    978-0-415-82206-0
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Description

This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is constructed in and mediated by the affective and the sensational. It analyzes class division, class difference, and class identity in American culture, enabling readers to grasp why class matters, as well as the economic, social, and political matter of class. Redefining the field of American literary cultural studies and asking it to rethink its preoccupation with race and gender as primary determinants of identity, contributors explore the disciplining of the laboring body and of the emotions, the political role of the novel in contesting the limits of class power and authority, and the role of the modern consumer culture in both blurring and sharpening class divisions.

Contents

1. Introduction Andrew Lawson Part I: Class in Early American Literature 2. The Servant Problem in Early American Literature Matthew Peters 3. The Shays Rebellion and US Literary History Ed White Part II: Class in the Antebellum Period 4. Cheap Reading and the Rise of a Proletarian Print Culture in the United States David M. Stewart 5. Picturing The City: Writing the Antebellum New York City Sketch and Forging a Middle-Class Reform Sensibility John Evelev 6. Shylock, Money, and Professional Manhood in and Antebellum Sensationalism David Anthony Part III: Class in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Period 7. Cultures of Class in the Gilded Age Labor Problem Novel Larry Isaac 8. The Civilization of the Commodity and the Maintenance of Inequality in Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman and The Marrow of Tradition Tim Libretti 9. Jack London and the American Socialist Narrative Cecilia Tichi Part IV: Class in the Early to Mid-Twentieth Century 10. Pedants, Priests, and Peons: Willa Cather and the Sublimation of Ressentiment Robert Seguin 11. ‘Working’ Class: Class Passing in Fiction of the Great Depression Jan Goggans 12. Broken Frames: The World War II Novel and the Dwindling Legibility of Class in the US Historical Imagination Chris Vials Part V: Class in Contemporary American Literature 13. A Killing Greed: Capitalism, Casinos, and the Fetish of Culture in Contemporary Native American Literature Melanie Benson 14. Farm Workers in Chicano Literature Marcial González Part VI: Teaching Class 15. A Modest Proposal for an End to Exceptionalism in U.S. Literary Studies Bill V. Mullan Contributors Index

Author Bio

Andrew Lawson is Senior Lecturer in English at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.

Name: Class and the Making of American Literature: Created Unequal (Hardback) – Routledge 
Description: Edited by Andrew Lawson. This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies...
Categories: American & Canadian Literature, American Studies, Social Class