Narrating Class in American Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • William Dow

   Pages 1-16

3. Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass: “Hard Work and Blood”

   • William Dow

   Pages 17-43

4. Class and the Performative in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, and Stephen Crane’s Maggie

   • William Dow

   Pages 45-73

5. Body Tramping, Class, and Masculine Extremes: Jack London’s The People of the Abyss

   • William Dow

   Pages 75-103

6. “Always Your Heart”: Class Designs in Jean Toomer’s Cane

   • William Dow

   Pages 105-131

7. Meridel Le Sueur’s Salute to Spring: “A Movement Up Which All Are Moving”

   • William Dow

   Pages 133-162

8. Class, Work, and New Races: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth

   • William Dow

   Pages 163-185

9. Class “Truths” in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

   • William Dow

   Pages 187-217

10. Conclusion

    • William Dow

    Pages 219-223

11. Back Matter

    Pages 225-271

    PDF

Focusing on American fiction from 1850-1940, Narrating Class in American Fiction offers close readings in the context of literary and political history to detail the uneasy attention American authors gave to class in their production of social identities.

• America
• body
• corpus
• design
• fiction
• god
• history
• history of literature
• political history
• truth
• William James
• english

"Like his writers, Dow combines craft consciousness and class consciousness. He is especially good in his chapters on Whitman, Le Sueur, Agee, and his sections on literary journalism. Narrating Class in American Fiction is balanced and perceptive, one of the best of the recent studies of literature and class in America." - Robert Shulman, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Washington

"Narrating Class in American Fiction engages us in more than one way. Not only does it make an important and insightful contribution to the scholarship on the issue of class in American literature, but it also provides a welcome and long overdue examination of the influence of journalism on American literature. For too long those connections have remained largely unexamined. Now Dow's book eloquently provides insight into how literary journalism helped to shape the work of such authors as Whitman, Crane, and London. Equally important, he contributes to restoring the importance of such authors as Rebecca Harding Davis, Meridel Le Sueur, Zora Neale Hurston, and Agnes Smedley, again through the prism of how their journalistically infused literature and literary journalism ultimately shaped their literary visions. Narrating Class in American Fiction is to be commended for helping fill the void of a history we have long been denied." - John C. Hartsock, SUNY Cortland and the author of A History of American Literary Journalism

WILLIAM DOW is Assistant Professor, The American University of Paris and Maitre de Conferences, The University of Valenciennes, France. 

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