The Working Class in American Literature

John F. Lavelle is an associate professor at Florida Tech where he teaches English, literature, and creative writing. He is the author of one other scholarly book and has published articles and papers in academic journals on the interception of class and literature. Debbie Lelekis is an associate professor teaching literature and writing classes at Florida Tech. Her scholarly research focuses on the notion of community in nineteenth and early twentieth century American fiction.

Table of Contents


Preface

John F. Lavelle

Introduction

John F. Lavelle

The “giddy ­hows-wife” Revealed: Classifying Humor in Sarah Kemble Knight’s The Journal of Madame Knight

Teresa M. Coronado

Twain’s Antithetical Discourses in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

John F. Lavelle

Violence, Labor and Collective Action in William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes

Debbie Lelekis

Writing the Spectacle of the Human Zoo: Literary Slumming and the Animalized Other in Maggie, A Girl of the Streets

Kailey Havelock

Social Radicalism in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio

Deborah Giggle

Losing Control: Contrasting Identity Constructs in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Charlene Taylor Evans

“One had to have castes”: Class, Culture and Ideology in American Tragedy

Adam Nemmers

The Sun Also Rises for Some: Hemingway’s Exploration of the Ideologies of Social Class in The Sun Also Rises

John F. Lavelle and Debbie Lelekis

Accidents of Birth: A Class Study of Faulkner’s Colonel John Satoris, Emily Grierson and Abner Snopes

Michael J. Finnegan

The Root and the Link: Talismans of ­Class-Consciousness in Douglass’ Narrative and Ellison’s Invisible Man

Mark Henderson

Haunted Privilege: Uncanny Estates in Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson

Jason Marc Harris

About the Contributors

Index