Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature

by Tokarczyk; Michelle

• ISBN13: 9780415885461
• ISBN10: 0415885469
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-25
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book is one of the first collections on a neglected field in American literature: that written by and about the working-class. Examining literature from the 1850s to the present, contributors use a wide variety of critical approaches, expanding readers' understanding of the critical lenses that can be applied to working-class literature. Drawing upon theories of media studies, postcolonial studies, cultural geography, and masculinity studies, the essays consider slave narratives, contemporary poetry and fiction, Depression-era newspaper plays, and ethnic American literature. Depicting the ways that working-class writers render the lives, the volume explores the question of what difference class makes, and how it intersects with gender, race, ethnicity, and geographical location.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xi
Publication Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
The Realities of Working-Class Life	p. 15
"between the outhouse and the garbage dump": Locating Collapse in Depression Literature	p. 17
Work is a War, or All Their Lives They Dug Their Graves	p. 35
Respectability, Refinement, and the Underclass: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	p. 52
Pedagogy and Promises	p. 69
Bridges, Not Ladders: Working-Class Women Poets on Education, Class Consciousness, and the Promise of Upward Mobility	p. 71
Charlotte Simmons as Working-Class Heroine in Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons	p. 87
(Un)teaching the Anthology: Pedagogy versus Canon in Working-Class Literature	p. 103
The Experience of Poverty	p. 123
Agency, Not Alligators: Poor Women and Outside Assistance in Three Short Stories	p. 125
Homeless in Seattle: Class Violence in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer	p. 141
Cultural Geography and Local Economies: The Lesson from Egypt, Maine	p. 159
Reconsidering Class, Gender, and Nation	p. 175
A Body of Work: Imperial Labor and the Writing of American Manhood in London's The Sea-Wolf	p. 177
"The Man in the Family": Staging Gender in Waiting for Lefty and American Social Protest Theatre	p. 204
Henry Roth's Reimagination of Class Consciousness from Call it Sleep to the Mercy of a Rude Stream Novels: Class Consciousness, Nationalist Politics, and Working-Class Studies in the Age of Cosmopolitanism	p. 219
Notes on Contributors	p. 237
Index	p. 241
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