Table Of ContentTHE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO
LITERATURE AND CLASS
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 per-
spectives 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.
Gloria McMillan is Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Arizona.
Her dissertation won the Florence Hemley Schneider Prize in Women’s Studies. She has taught
college writing for over 27 years, has a number of produced plays (Universe Symphony, Pass the
Ectoplasm), and has published a novel (The Blue Maroon Murder) and journal articles. She edited the
multi-disciplinary essay collection Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars (2012).
ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS
Also available in this series:
The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction
Edited by Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone
The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies
Edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature
Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer
The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities
Edited by Paul Crawford, Brian Brown and Andrea Charise
The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction
Edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Andrew Pepper
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma
Edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability
Edited by Alice Hall
The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature
Edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Neil Murphy, and W. Michelle Wang
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature
Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer
The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature
Edited by Jessica Gildersleeve
The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen
Edited by Cheryl A. Wilson and Maria H. Frawley
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class
Edited by Gloria McMillan
For more information on this series, please visit: www .r outle dge .c om /li terat ure /s eries /RC44 44
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION
TO LITERATURE AND CLASS
Edited by
Gloria McMillan
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Taylor & Francis
The right of Gloria McMillan to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-44211-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-04294-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-00835-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
This text is gratefully dedicated to my mother, Gloria Houck Ptacek,
and our contributing essayist, Aaron Barlow.
v
CONTENTS
List of Contributors x
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction to The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class 1
PART I
History of the Intersections of Class 11
1 Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender in Australian Indigenous Literature 13
Sarah Attfield
2 Class Shifts in Yuan Dynasty China 27
Kacey Evilsizor
3 Victorian Socialist Obituaries and the Politics of Cross-Class Community 38
Ingrid Hanson
4 Social Class and Devastated Land in Yang Dantao’s Science Fiction 51
Hua Li
5 New York Literature and Social Space: The Tenement and the Street 63
Adam R. McKee
6 Elena Ferrante’s Fiction of Problematized Providing and Protecting 77
Cristina Migliaccio
7 Dickens and Society: Can Dickens’s “Uppers” Change Their Minds? 91
Peter J. Ponzio
vii
Contents
8 Songs of Synthesis: Poetics of Working-Class Revolt 105
Zara Richter
9 The Urban Spatiality of Street Literature 118
Mattius Rischard
10 Allegories of Proletarian Literature: Boyden, Bontemps, and Halper in the
Depression Era 131
William Solomon
11 Angry Young Men and the Loss of Empire 145
Stanley Wilkin
PART II
Class in Literature: Intermittently (In)visible 161
12 Race and Class as Catalysts for Obscuring a Novel 163
Aaron Barlow
13 Productive Disruption in the Working-Class Poetry of Jan Beatty, Sandra
Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman 176
Carrie Conners
14 Rhetorical Voice and Class in Adichie’s “Subaltern” Fiction 189
Kristy Liles Crawley
15 Dickens’s Fairness in Describing Italian Complexity 202
Germana Cubeta
16 The British Working-Class Bildungsroman during the Great Depression 220
Charles Ferrall
17 Enunciations and Avoidances of Capital and Class in Evolving Irish Theatre 233
Eamonn Jordan
18 Class and Upper-Middle-Class Consciousness in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories 247
Peter R. Kuch
19 Writing Working-Class Irish Mothers 259
Heather Laird
20 Social Class and Mental Health in Contemporary British Fiction 269
Simon Lee
viii
Contents
21 Penny Fiction and Chartism: A Literature’s Exclusion from the Canon 281
Rebecca Nesvet
22 Abject Capitalism as the Sight of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Novels 293
Matthew L. Reznicek
PART III
New Multifactor Trends in Literature Theory 307
23 Ta-Nehisi Coates Demystifies American Class and Race Mythology 309
Marleen S. Barr
24 Desiring Weird Bodies: Class Subjectivities in Hardy, Wilde, and Woolf 321
Rebecca W. Boylan
25 Oral Storytelling as a Transnational Aesthetic in the Industrial Novel 333
Erin Cheslow
26 Class, Race, and Social Stratification in British Theatre between the 1950s
and 2000s 345
Önder Çakırtaş
27 Pecuniary Emulation, Anomie, and the Alleged Metropolitan Conversion of
Sister Carrie 359
Wendy Graham
28 Power and the Dialectics of Twentieth-Century Science Fiction 372
Christopher Loughlin
29 The Strange Case of Dystopian Fiction 385
Patricia McManus
30 On Capital and Class with Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald 398
Erik S. Roraback
31 Darwinian Ideas and Marxian Idealism in Austen, Twain, Yeats, Camus, and
Ishiguro 412
Nancy Ann Watanabe
32 The “Metaholon” Method for Class-Based Literary Analysis 426
Agnieszka M. Will
Index 445
ix
