The syntax of class : writing inequality in nineteenth-century America / Amy Schrager Lang.

By:

Lang, Amy Schrager

Publication details: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2003.Description: 152 p. ; 25 cmISBN:

0691113890 (acidfree paper)

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

810.9/355 21

LOC classification:

PS374.S68 L36 2003

Contents:

Introduction: Class, Classification, and Conflict. Ch. I. Home, in the Better Sense: The Model Woman, the Middle Class, and the Harmony of Interests. Ch. II. Orphaned in America: Color, Class, and Community. Ch. III. Indexical People: Women, Workers, and the Limits of Literary Language. Ch. IV. Beginning Again: Love, Money, and a Circle of "Friends". Epilogue.

Summary: Publisher description: 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.

Holdings ( 1 )
Title notes ( 3 )

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Shelving location	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	NMC Library	Stacks	PS374 .S68 L36 2003 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		33039000698208

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Previous	PS374 .S5 L48 1993 The culture and commerce of the American short story /	PS374 .S54 S76 1990 Strategies of reticence : silence and meaning in the works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion /	PS374 .S67 G73 2003 Hybrid fictions : American literature and Generation X /	PS374 .S68 L36 2003 The syntax of class : writing inequality in nineteenth-century America /	PS374 .S82 B48 2004 SuburbiaNation : reading suburban landscape in twentieth-century American fiction and film /	PS374 .V35 D39 2002 Vampire legends in contemporary American culture : what becomes a legend most /	PS374 .W4 J6 The dime novel western /	Next

Includes bibliographical references (p. [131]-147) and index.

Publisher description: 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.