Full Description
This book traces the phenomenon of class from the medieval to the postmodern period, uniquely examining its relevance to literary and cultural analysis. Drawing on historical, sociological and literary writings, Gary Day:
* gives an account of class at different historical moments
* shows the role of class in literary constructions of the social
* examines the complex relations between 'class' and 'culture'
* focuses attention on the role of class in constructions of 'the literary' and 'the canon'
* employs a revived and revised notion of class to critique recent theoretical movements.
Contents
Introduction; A brief history of 'class'; Marx and class; Class and status; Class and exchange; Exchange and 'literature' 1 Medieval; The estates model of society; Class and the peasants; The 'individual'; 'Sir Gareth of Orkney' and social mobility; Piers the Ploughman; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: identity and exchange 2 The Renaissance; Criticism and cultural production: warring significations; The intelligentsia and class; Renaissance England; The nobility and the gentry; The bourgeoisie; Masterless men; Class or status? Money, exchange and self 3 The Civil War and after; The English Revolution: a class war? Class society versus status society; The body and the bourgeoisie; Classification and capitalist economics; The plain style and the bourgeoisie; Money, self and class; Paradise Lost (1667): bedding down the bourgeois economy 4 The eighteenth century; Patricians, plebs and the persistence of hierarchy; The meanings of 'class' and the rise of the middle class; The free market and representation; Reason, the plain style and class; The 'individual', the 'subject' and money; The novel and class; 5 The nineteenth century; Class and hierarchy; Components of the English working class; The economic relations of class and class consciousness; Chartism; The 'human' and class: North and South; The individual and class; Poverty and class in the late nineteenth century; New unionism and socialism; Culture and class 6 The twentieth century; he economy of modernism; The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists; The inter-war years: who speaks for the workers? Love on the Dole; Post-war: affluence and class; The classless society? Class and post-structuralism
