Around Quitting Time - Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction

Posits social class as the American political unconscious, showing (in an analysis of 19th and 20th century novels) how class exerts pressure on the American cultural imagination, and claiming that what is desired is ultimately the liberation from work.

List of contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Class, Middle Class, and the Modalities of Labor

2. The Burden of Toil: Sister Carrie as Urban Pastoral

3. Willa Cather and the Ambivalence of Hierarchy

4. New Frontiers in Hollywood: Mobility and Desire in The Day of the Locust

5. Into the 1950s: Fiction in a Age of Consensus

Postscript: The Insistence of Class and the Framing of Culture in the American Scene

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Robert Seguin is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York at Brockport.

Summary

Focuses on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America. This book will interest literary scholars, and those who explore the interaction between economic and cultural forms.

Product details

• Authors: Seguin, Robert Seguin
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 20.06.2001
• EAN: 9780822326755
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-2675-5
• No. of pages: 224
• Weight: 649 g
• Series: New Americanists; New Americanists
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, USA, Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Autoren, Amerikanisches Englisch, Regionalstudien