{"product_id":"class-fictions","title":"Class Fictions","description":"Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the concept of class shame, she produces a model of working-class subjectivity that understands resistance in a more accurate and useful way-as a complicated kind of refusal, directed at both dominated and dominant culture.\u003cbr\u003eWith a focus on certain classics in the working-class literary \"canon,\" such as \u003ci\u003eThe Ragged Trousered Philanthropists\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eLove on the Dole,\u003c\/i\u003e as well as lesser-known texts by working-class women, Fox uncovers the anxieties that underlie representations of class and consciousness. Shame repeatedly emerges as a powerful counterforce in these works, continually unsettling the surface narrative of protest to reveal an ambivalent relation toward the working-class identities the novels apparently champion. \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eClass Fictions\u003c\/i\u003e offers an equally rigorous analysis of cultural studies itself, which has historically sought to defend and value the radical difference of working-class culture. Fox also brings to her analysis a strong feminist perspective that devotes considerable attention to the often overlooked role of gender in working-class fiction. She demonstrates that working-class novels not only expose master narratives of middle-class culture that must be resisted, but that they also reveal to us a need to create counter narratives or formulas of working-class life. In doing so, this book provides a more subtle sense of the role of resistance in working class culture. While of interest to scholars of Victorian and working-class fiction, Pamela Fox’s argument has far-reaching implications for the way literary and cultural studies will be defined and practiced.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54246883492184,"sku":"9780822315421","price":33.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780822315421__6765f173e4fb1.jpg?v=1741148169","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/class-fictions","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}