ABSTRACT
In a 2000 PMLA special topic issue on class, Cynthia Ward in her article “From the Suwanee to Egypt, There’s No Place like Home” questioned the lack of critical attention to two working-class novels, Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee and Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine . Commenting on the academy’s interest in “issues of identity,” she asked, “[w]hy has no critical perspective emerged to examine these novels’ representations of working-class identity?” (Ward 76). 1 Ward answered her question in part by arguing that their novels “expose and resist commodifying reading practices” (80). Ward effectively demonstrates the novel’s resistance to middle-class readers, but the central question she posed in 2000 persists a decade later. Although any list of working-class literature would necessarily include Chute’s 1985 novel, her work continues to receive very little critical attention, no doubt because of its refusal to make valuations about the working poor and because of its implicit resistance to middle-class mores.
