000			03035cam a22003738a 4500
001			2002030780
003			DLC
005			20190729102658.0
008			020806s2003 nju b 001 0 eng
010			_a 2002030780
020			_a0691113890 (acidfree paper)
040			_aDLC _cDLC _dDLC
043			_an-us---
049			_aEY8Z
050	0	0	_aPS374.S68 _bL36 2003
082	0	0	_a810.9/355 _221
100	1		_aLang, Amy Schrager.
245	1	4	_aThe syntax of class : _bwriting inequality in nineteenth-century America / _cAmy Schrager Lang.
260			_aPrinceton, N.J. : _bPrinceton University Press, _cc2003.
300			_a152 p. ; _c25 cm.
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references (p. [131]-147) and index.
505	0		_aIntroduction: Class, Classification, and Conflict. Ch. I. Home, in the Better Sense: The Model Woman, the Middle Class, and the Harmony of Interests. Ch. II. Orphaned in America: Color, Class, and Community. Ch. III. Indexical People: Women, Workers, and the Limits of Literary Language. Ch. IV. Beginning Again: Love, Money, and a Circle of "Friends". Epilogue.
520			_aPublisher description: The Syntax of Class explores the literary expression of the crisis of social classification that occupied U.S. public discourse in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848. Lacking a native language for expressing class differences, American writers struggled to find social taxonomies able to capture--and manage--increasingly apparent inequalities of wealth and power. As new social types emerged at midcentury and, with them, new narratives of success and failure, police and reformers alarmed the public with stories of the rise and proliferation of the "dangerous classes." At the same time, novelists as different as Maria Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Horatio Alger Jr. focused their attention on dense engagements across the lines of class. Turning to the middle-class idea of "home" as a figure for social harmony and to the lexicons of race and gender in their effort to devise a syntax for the representation of class, these writers worked to solve the puzzle of inequity in their putatively classless nation. This study charts the kaleidoscopic substitution of terms through which they rendered class distinctions and follows these renderings as they circulated in and through a wider cultural discourse about the dangers of class conflict. This welcome book is a finely achieved study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century American fiction--and of its entanglements with the languages of race and gender.
650		0	_aAmerican fiction _y19th century _xHistory and criticism.
650		0	_aSocial classes in literature.
650		0	_aLiterature and society _zUnited States _xHistory _y19th century.
650		0	_aSocial conflict in literature.
650		0	_aSex role in literature.
650		0	_aRace in literature.
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596			_a1
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