A history of American working-class literature
By: edited by Nicholas Coles, Paul Lauter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 489
ISBN-13: 9781107103382
Subjects: American Working class writings; History and criticism
Description: "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."--Book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction  -- Nicholas Coles and Paul Lauter; title: Transportation narratives: servants, convicts, and the literature of colonization in British America  -- Matthew Pethers; title: Why work? Early American theories and practices  -- Paul Lauter; title: Labor and literary culture in and beyond bondage: early African-American expressive culture  -- John Ernest; title: Lowell Mill girls: women's work and writing in the early nineteenth century  -- Christopher Hager; title: 'Wet paper between us': Whitman and the transformations of labor  -- Peter Riley; title: Millions and mills: class and the antebellum novel  -- Amy Schrager Lang; title: 'We are not slaves': the shadow of slavery in nineteenth-century poetry and song  -- John Marsh; title: Utopian labors: work in nineteenth- and twentieth-century utopian and dystopian fiction  -- James V. Catano; title: Toward a more perfect union: marriage plots in socialist fiction, 1901-1917  -- Alicia Williamson; title: What workers were reading, 1830-1930  -- Jan Goggans; title: Getting the word out: institutions and forms of publication  -- Mark Noonan; title: Genre and form in working-class life writing, from Haymarket to the New Deal  -- Michael Collins; title: Working the fields: love and labor in farm fiction from 1890 to the Dust Bowl  -- Nicholas Coles; title: Proletarian literature: fiction and the predicaments of class culture  -- Lawrence Hanley; title: Go left, young women: proletarian women writers  -- Michelle Tokarczyk; title: 'I have seen black hands': a twentieth-century African-American tradition  -- Bill V. Mullen; title: The American labor song tradition  -- Richard Flacks; title: Prison literature from the early Republic to Attica  -- Joe Lockard; title: The workers' theatre of the twentieth century  -- Amy Brady; title: The evolution of the poetry of work: from the Red Decade to the end of the Cold War  -- Cary Nelson; title: The labor plot: one hundred years of class struggle and the silver screen  -- Kathy M. Newman; title: Globalization, migration, and contemporary working-class literature  -- Joseph Entin; title: Narrating economic restructuring: working-class literature after deindustrialization  -- Sherry Lee Linkon; title: A turn of the sphere: the place of class in intersectional analysis -- Sara Appel.