A01=Amy Schrager Lang
Abolitionism
African Americans
American middle class
Americans
Author_Amy Schrager Lang
Black people
Book
Bourgeoisie
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=JBSA
Class conflict
Class consciousness
Class Warfare
Domestic worker
Economic inequality
Economic mobility
Effeminacy
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Exclusion
Femininity
Feminism
Gentlewoman
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Homelessness
Homosociality
Horatio Alger
Household
Identity (social science)
Ideology
Individualism
Laborer
Life in the Iron Mills
Literary criticism
Middle class
Modesty
Mr.
Mrs.
Narrative
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nobility
Novel
Novelist
Oppression
Our Nig
Pity
Poverty
Prejudice
Project
Proletarianization
Public sphere
Racism
Ragged Dick
Rebecca Harding Davis
Residence
Same-sex relationship
Self-sufficiency
Sensibility
Sexism
Slavery
Sobriquet
Social class
Social order
Superiority (short story)
The House of the Seven Gables
Theft
Uncle Tom
Underclass
Upper class
W. E. B. Du Bois
Wage slavery
Wai Chee Dimock
Wealth
Working class
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691113890
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 26 Jan 2003
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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. As new social types emerged at midcentury and, with them, new narratives of success and failure, police and reformers alarmed the public with stories of the rise and proliferation of the "dangerous classes." At the same time, novelists as different as Maria Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Horatio Alger Jr. focused their attention on dense engagements across the lines of class. Turning to the middle-class idea of "home" as a figure for social harmony and to the lexicons of race and gender in their effort to devise a syntax for the representation of class, these writers worked to solve the puzzle of inequity in their putatively classless nation.
This study charts the kaleidoscopic substitution of terms through which they rendered class distinctions and follows these renderings as they circulated in and through a wider cultural discourse about the dangers of class conflict. This welcome book is a finely achieved study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century American fiction--and of its entanglements with the languages of race and gender.
Amy Schrager Lang teaches American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of "Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson" and the "Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England".
