Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature

ISBN-13: 9780415885461 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 266 str.

Michelle Tokarczyk

Opis

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.

Recenzje

"[A] much-needed and much-welcomed anthology of literary criticism... this volume stands as an excellent reflection of the current state of working-class literary studies, as it also sets the stage for future forward movement." - Working-Class Notes

Spis treści

Introduction.  Part I: The Realities of Working-Class Life  1. Between the Outhouse and the Garbage Dump: Locating Collapse in Depression Literature. Paula Rabinowitz  2. Work is a War or, All Their Lives They Dug Their Graves. Renny Christopher  3. Respectability, Refinement, and the Underclass: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Sylvia J. Cook  Part II: Pedagogy and Promises  4. Bridges, Not Ladders: Working-Class Women Poets on Education, Class Consciousness, and the Promise of Upward Mobility. Karen Kovacik  5. Charlotte Simmons as Working-Class Heroine in Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons. David McCracken  6. [Un]teaching the Anthology: Pedagogy vs Canon in Working-Class Literature. Nicholas Coles  Part III: The Experience of Poverty  7. Agency Not Alligators: Poor Women and Outside Assistance in Three Short Stories. Michelle M. Tokarczyk  8. Homeless in Seattle: Class Violence in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer. Michele Fazio  9. Cultural Geography and Local Economies: The Lesson from Egypt, Maine. Phoebe S.Jackson  Part IV: Reconsidering Class, Gender, and Nation  10. A Body of Work: Imperial Labor and the Writing of American Manhood in London’s The Sea-Wolf. Matthew Brophy  11. The Man in the Family": Staging Gender in Waiting for Lefty and American Social Protest Theatre. Maria F. Brandt  12. Henry Roth’s Re-Imagination 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. Tim Libretti

O autorze

Michelle M. Tokarczyk is a professor of English at Goucher College with publications in working-class studies and contemporary literature. Publications include Class Definitions: On the Lives and Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison, the co-edited Working-Class Women in the Academy, and The House I’m Running From: Poems .