Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Significant changes occurred in the meaning of the term “class” during the early nineteenth century, a period when numerous developments in the American economy helped to bring about the change from a society where divisions in rank and wealth exist to a modern “class society.” The social theorist Anthony Giddens defines this as “one in which class relationships are of primary significance to the explanatory interpretation of large areas of social conduct” (Blumin 1989: 8). A good deal of American fiction written during the decades immediately preceding the Civil War (1820–60) registers – and helps to shape – the development of a modern class society and the new class consciousness accompanying it. This corpus of literary work especially reveals the cultural importance of the new kind of “middle-class” identity emerging in this era. The values associated with the middle class – sentimental feeling, Christian ethics, familial love, cultural refinement, individual rights, hard work, entrepreneurial initiative – came to dominate American culture and American fiction during these decades. Many prose literary forms generally upheld the ideal of an open, fluid society in which advancement was based on merit instead of inherited privilege; in this way, much of middle-class fiction either denied the reality of class conflict in the United States or imposed forms of sentimental feeling to ... log in or subscribe to read full text