2. Production: Classes and Class Relations

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-106
Keyword(s):  
Class Relations

Persuasion: Fellow Creatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.

Rationalism, Christianity, and Ambiguity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Full Scale ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Short History ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
Complex Words

This chapter examines the work of William Empson, the critic normally assumed to be the least historical in his approach, especially his close attention to ‘the words on the page’. It shows how even his earliest work, such as Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral, is shot through with historical assumptions—indeed, the latter book contains a short history of class relations in England. It moves on to a full-scale discussion of his most daunting work, The Structure of Complex Words, showing the ways in which it is structured by an interpretation of history between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, revealing Empson to be a significant historian of English ethical life, who did not share the prevailing declinist or anti-Whig perspective.

Realism and the Middle-Class Balancing Act

2019 ◽  
pp. 463-483
Author(s):  
Patrick Chura
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
The Subject

This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.

Daily Encounters That Make History: History from Below and Archival Collaboration

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-143
Author(s):  
Hanan Hammad
Keyword(s):  
Nile Delta ◽  
Red Light ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Factory Worker ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Egypt ◽  
Red Light District

What does a casual confrontation in a rundown shack between a landlady and her factory-worker tenant tell us about the history of gender and class relations in modern Egypt? Could a lost watch in a red-light district in the middle of the Nile Delta complicate our understanding of the history of sexuality and urbanization? Can an unexpectedly intimate embrace on a sleeping mat illuminate a link in the history of class, gender, and urbanization in modern Egypt?

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