San Antonio College Library

"Dividing Lines is one of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature. Clear and engaging, this book unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled popular notions that black...

"In this book, Stephen P. Rice offers a new understanding of class formation in American during the several decades before the Civil War. This was the period in the nation's early industrial development when travel by steamboat became commonplace, when the railroad altered concepts of space and time, and when Americans experienced the beginnings of factory production." "Minding the Machine shows how members of a new middle class laid claim to their...

"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."--Jacket.

"Communal Feminisms explores identity and exile from three different perspectives: theory, interviews, and imaginative literature. The first part of this book describes and defines exile within identity; the second part delivers twelve interviews and examines the sociohistorical construction of exile through Chicana literature and Chilean literature created and circulated during the Pinochet regime; and the third part contains a collection of unpublished,...

"'Rich girl meets poor boy who liberates her then dies.' Or, 'low-life girl is trashed by lower-life boy.' The contemporary middle-class fictions of poverty that inform films such as Titanic and Kids are a far cry from the nineteenth-century genres: rags-to-riches stories and seduction tales. Our fictions of class turn the older tales upside down. By the surprising juxtaposition of recent films and the classic writings and unusual lives of Zora Neale...

"This bold new reading of Orwell's work focuses upon his representation of communities and the myths that shape them. In particular, it analyses his interpretations of class, gender and nationality within the context of the political and literary culture of the 1930s and 1940s. It consequently intervenes in key debates over the significance and legacy of one of the most-widely-read and influential authors of the twentieth century. Ben Clarke uses...

Combines Marxist, feminist, and post-structuralist ideas to show how Richardson's writing anticipated many of the sexual and political concerns of our time.