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

Robert Seguin

Published by Duke University Press 2001

Around Quitting Time

Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction

Robert Seguin
Edited by: Donald E. Pease

In the series New Americanists

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822380818

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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

Reviews

“A remarkably positive achievement that contributes significantly to an understanding of quite a range of texts, to an understanding of specific currents of literary modernism, and most generally to an understanding of class, which—in a U.S. context especially—remains that most vexed of social categories.”—Evan Watkins, Pennsylvania State University

“Rob Seguin’s Around Quitting Time makes a major contribution to discussions of class formation in the United States. His original readings of novels by Dreiser, Cather, West, and Barth brilliantly pursue the ghostly tracks of social and cultural change as they are rendered in fine narrative and linguistic detail within the domain of the literary. His mode of reading is as significant as his argument about the "classlessness" of the middle class. Indeed, Seguin demonstrates in exemplary fashion that it is possible to attend to literature as a social and political force without neglecting the specificity of its aesthetic work.”—Jan Radway, Duke University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
One Class, Middle Class, and the Modalities of Labor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Two The Burden of Toil: Sister Carrie as Urban Pastoral Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Three Willa Cather and the Ambivalence of Hierarchy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
Four New Frontiers in Hollywood: Mobility and Desire in The Day of the Locust Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
Five Into the 1950s: Fiction in the Age of Consensus Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
Postscript The Insistence of Class and the Framing of Culture in the American Scene Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	153
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 221

eBook

Published: June 20, 2001
ISBN: 9780822380818