Publisher's Synopsis
In recent years, as the centrality of race and gender has been established in literary studies, class has often been seen as a crude and reductionist concept. For this volume, the editors have commissioned essays arguing for the continuing vitality as well as the energizing problematics of the category of class.;The book's introduction addresses the ways that the concept of class has been employed in both literary and historical analysis, and the importance of a renewed interest in class in the current trend toward historicism.;The first section of the book restores class to its moment of inception as both a theoretical construct and an objectively descriptive category. In the second section, the contributors test some of the general propositions set forth by examining the categorization of class as itself a history and a problematic. The text concludes by asking how the category of class can enrich and complicate our response to specific literary texts.
