E-Book Overview
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.
E-Book Content
Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature
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Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
1. Testimony from the Nazi Camps French Women's Voices Margaret-Anne Hutton 2. Modern Confessional Writing New Critical Essays Edited by Jo Gill 3. Cold War Literature Writing the Global Conflict Andrew Hammond 4. Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty Andrew John Miller 5. Cartographic Strategies of Post modernity The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction Peta Mitchell 6. Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption Eating the Avant-Garde Michel Delville 7. Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema Jason Borge 8. Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics Les Brookes 9. Anglophone Jewish Literature Axel Stahler
10. Before Auschwitz Irene Nemirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France Angela Kershaw 11. Travel and Drugs in TwentiethCentury Literature Lindsey Michael Banco 12. Diary Poetics Form and Style in Writers' Diaries, 1915-1962 Anna Jackson 13. Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change Race, Sex and Nation Gerardine Meaney 14. Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern Neil R. Davison 15. Travel and Modernist Literature Sacred and Ethical Journeys Alexandra Peat 16. Primo Levi's Narratives of Embodiment Containing the Human Charlotte Ross 17. ltalo Calvina's Architecture of Lightness The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis Letizia Modena
18. Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing The Innovative Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David By Alice Lee Mclean 19. Making Space in the Works of James Joyce Edited by Valerie Benejam and John Bishop 20. Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature Edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk
Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature
Edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER ~~ ~~o~~!:~~~up New York
London
For my husband, Paul]. Groncki First published 2011 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of the Michelle M. Tokarczyk to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Sahon by IBT Global. Printed and hound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may he reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. T