ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class offers a comprehensive and fresh assessment of the cultural impact of class in literature, analyzing various innovative, interdisciplinary approaches of textual analysis and intersections of literature, including class subjectivities, mental health, gender and queer studies, critical race theory, quantitative and scientific methods, and transnational perspectives in literary analysis.

Utilizing these new methods and interdisciplinary maps from field-defining essayists, students will become aware of ways to bring these elusive texts into their own writing as one of the parallel perspectives through which to view literature. This volume will provide students with an insight into the history of the intersections of class, theory of class and invisibility in literature, and new trends in exploring class in literature. These multidimensional approaches to literature will be a crucial resource for undergraduate and graduate students becoming familiar with class analysis, and will offer seasoned scholars the most significant critical approaches in class studies.

part I|150 pages

History of the Intersections of Class

chapter 5|14 pages

New York Literature and Social Space

The Tenement and the Street

chapter 7|14 pages

Dickens and Society

Can Dickens's “Uppers” Change Their Minds?

chapter 8|13 pages

Songs of Synthesis

Poetics of Working-Class Revolt

chapter 10|14 pages

Allegories of Proletarian Literature

Boyden, Bontemps, and Halper in the Depression Era

part II|146 pages

Class in Literature

chapter 19|10 pages

Writing Working-Class Irish Mothers

chapter 21|12 pages

Penny Fiction and Chartism

A Literature's Exclusion from the Canon

part III|138 pages

New Multifactor Trends in Literature Theory

chapter 24|12 pages

Desiring Weird Bodies

Class Subjectivities in Hardy, Wilde, and Woolf