Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In much of American literary study, and indeed in American culture more generally, class remains an underexamined or taboo issue. As Renny Christopher and Carolyn Whitson argue, “ ‘Class’ is almost always ignored in the contemporary critical discourse of ‘race, class, and gender’ ” (1999: 72). The growing field of working-class studies, including the work of scholars like Janet Zandy and Laura Hapke and institutions such as the Center for Working-Class Studies (CWCS) at Youngstown University in Ohio, foregrounds the need for historical and theoretical work on the cultures of the American working class. It is important to stress that this call for attention to class does not mean denying the importance of other scholarly and interpretive frameworks such as race, gender, and sexuality. The CWCS home page explains, “while most critics in the field reject the notion that class is a supercategory under which all other identities are subsumed, class is understood as an important connecting element linking the various marginalized groups, all of whom share a position of subordination under capitalism” (CWCS). Although much of the literary scholarship in this field has focused on working-class writers or on representations of workers (see Denning 1998; Hapke 2001; Zandy 2001), I suggest that the study of class in literature can be productively extended to the full range of American literature. ... log in or subscribe to read full text