Class and the Making of American Literature

Created Unequal

Andrew Lawson editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:4th Mar '14

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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Class and the Making of American Literature cover

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.

"This volume will be valuable to specialists in American studies and literature, working-class studies, and sociology. Summing Up: Recommended." -- K A. Welsch, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, CHOICE

"Andrew Lawson’s capably-edited, wide-ranging volume on issues of class in American letters presents itself as an intervention into a milieu in which class has tended "to drop out of the trinity of critical terms," that is, race, class, and gender. As a rule, its fifteen authors perform this intervention effectively, often by drawing attention to previously neglected or non-canonical texts." -- Wiley College, Marshall, Texas


"This volume will be valuable to specialists in American studies and literature, working-class studies, and sociology. Summing Up: Recommended." -- K A. Welsch, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, CHOICE

ISBN: 9780415822060

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 730g

306 pages