A History of American Working-Class Literature

Cambridge University Press, 3/2/2017
EAN 9781107103382, ISBN10: 110710338X

Hardcover, 504 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm
Language: English

A History of American Working-Class Literature sheds light not only on the lived experience of class but the enormously varied creativity of working-class people throughout the history of what is now the United States. By charting a chronology of working-class experience, as the conditions of work have changed over time, this volume shows how the practice of organizing, economic competition, place, and time shape opportunity and desire. The subjects range from transportation narratives and slave songs to the literature of deindustrialization and globalization. Among the literary forms discussed are memoir, journalism, film, drama, poetry, speeches, fiction, and song. Essays focus on plantation, prison, factory, and farm, as well as on labor unions, workers' theaters, and innovative publishing ventures. Chapters spotlight the intersections of class with race, gender, and place. The variety, depth, and many provocations of this History are certain to enrich the study and teaching of American literature.

Introduction Nicholas Coles and Paul Lauter
1. Transportation narratives
servants, convicts, and the literature of colonization in British America Matthew Pethers
2. Why work? Early American theories and practices Paul Lauter
3. Labor and literary culture in and beyond bondage
early African-American expressive culture John Ernest
4. Lowell mill girls
women's work and writing in the early nineteenth century Christopher Hager
5. 'Wet paper between us'
Whitman and the transformations of labor Peter Riley
6. Millions and mills
class and the ante-bellum novel Amy Schrager Lang
7. 'We are not slaves'
the shadow of slavery in nineteenth-century poetry and song John Marsh
8. Utopian labors
work in nineteenth- and twentieth-century utopian and dystopian fiction James Catano
9. Towards a more perfect union
marriage plots in socialist fiction, 1901–17 Alicia Williamson
10. What workers were reading, 1830–1930 Jan Goggans
11. Getting the word out
institutions and forms of publication Mark Noonan
12. Genre and form in working-class life writing, from Haymarket to the New Deal Michael Collins
13. Working the fields
love and labor in farm fiction from 1890 to the Dust Bowl Nicholas Coles
14. Proletarian literature
fiction and the predicaments of class culture Lawrence Hanley
15. Go left young women
proletarian women writers Michelle Tokarczyk
16. 'I have seen black hands'
a twentieth-century African American tradition Bill Mullen
17. The American labor song tradition Richard Flacks
18. Prison literature from the early Republic to Attica Joe Lockard
19. The workers' theatre of the twentieth century Amy Brady
20. The evolution of the poetry of work
from the Red Decade to the end of the Cold War Cary Nelson
21. The labor plot
one hundred years of class struggle and the silver screen Kathleen Newman
22. Globalization, migration, and contemporary working-class literature Joseph Entin
23. Narrating economic restructuring
working-class literature after deindustrialization Sherry Lee Linkon
24. A turn of the sphere
the place of class in intersectional analysis Sara Appel.