Verwandte Artikel zu The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Centur...

The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America - Hardcover

Lang, Amy Schrager

 
9780691113890: The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0691113890 ISBN 13: 9780691113890
Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The Syntax of Class explores the literary expression of the crisis of social classification that occupied U.S. public discourse in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848. Lacking a native language for expressing class differences, American writers struggled to find social taxonomies able to capture--and manage--increasingly apparent inequalities of wealth and power.


As new social types emerged at midcentury and, with them, new narratives of success and failure, police and reformers alarmed the public with stories of the rise and proliferation of the "dangerous classes." At the same time, novelists as different as Maria Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Horatio Alger Jr. focused their attention on dense engagements across the lines of class. Turning to the middle-class idea of "home" as a figure for social harmony and to the lexicons of race and gender in their effort to devise a syntax for the representation of class, these writers worked to solve the puzzle of inequity in their putatively classless nation. This study charts the kaleidoscopic substitution of terms through which they rendered class distinctions and follows these renderings as they circulated in and through a wider cultural discourse about the dangers of class conflict.


This welcome book is a finely achieved study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century American fiction--and of its entanglements with the languages of race and gender.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amy Schrager Lang teaches American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"This is a tightly focused, original, and elegantly argued study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century U.S. fiction. It reveals for the first time a congeries of class-based relationships that have been, so to speak, hiding in plain sight. To readThe Syntax of Class is to understand the great extent to which U.S. nineteenth-century fiction produced the hegemonic middle class within a context of debates over inequality."--Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University

"Lang reveals how the ever-shifting problems of class identity in the United States can provide sophisticated structures for literary analysis. The result is an extremely well-written, solid, and sensitive work of literary and cultural history."--Gavin Jones, Stanford University

Aus dem Klappentext

"This is a tightly focused, original, and elegantly argued study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century U.S. fiction. It reveals for the first time a congeries of class-based relationships that have been, so to speak, hiding in plain sight. To readThe Syntax of Class is to understand the great extent to which U.S. nineteenth-century fiction produced the hegemonic middle class within a context of debates over inequality."--Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University

"Lang reveals how the ever-shifting problems of class identity in the United States can provide sophisticated structures for literary analysis. The result is an extremely well-written, solid, and sensitive work of literary and cultural history."--Gavin Jones, Stanford University

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Princeton University Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0691113890
ISBN 13 
9780691113890
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
168
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Princeton University Press
https://press.princeton.edu/books

7th Floor, New South Building
PRINCETON
NJ
8544
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar