Labor's Text charts how the worker has been portrayed and often misrepresented in American fiction. Laura Hapke offers hundreds of depictions of wage earners: from fiction on the early artisan "aristocrats" to the Gilded Age's union-busting novelists to the year 2000's marginalized, apolitical men and women. Whether the authors discussed are pro- or anti-labor, Hapke illuminates the literary, historical, and intellectual contexts in which their fiction was produced and read.
Laura Hapke is a professor of English at Pace University. The winner of two Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Book awards, she is the author of Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s and other books on labor fiction and working-class studies.
Table of Contents
Introduction : Whose plot is it anyway? 1. Workers in the wings : antebellum fictions 2. I'm looking through you : working men from status quo to knights of labor fiction 3. Labor's ladies : work fiction and true women from antebellum Lowell through the Gilded Age 4. Taking to their streets : ethnic cultures and labor texts in the sociological 1890s 5. Beastmen and labor experts : fiction and the problem of authority from 1900 to 1917 6. Facing the unwomanly : sweatshop and sex shop in progressive era labor fiction 7. The hungary eye : desire and disaffection in 1920s labor fiction 8. From Black folk to working class : African American labor fiction between the World Wars 9. Heroic at last : Depression era fiction 10. What war your crime? : representing labor in the HUAC era 11. The usable past : jobs, myths, and three racial-ethnic literatures of the Civil Rights era 12. Working-class twilight : White labor texts of the Civil Rights and Vietnam decades Conclusion : Everything old is new again : working through class in the literary 1990s
Labor's Text traverses nearly two centuries of the U.S. literary response in fiction to workers and the work experience. —(Alan Wald, author of Writing from the Left)
Janet Zandy
A stunning work of scholarship... —(Janet Zandy, author of Calling Home: Working-Class Women's Writings)
Paul Lauter
Paul Lauter, A.K & G.M. Smith Professor of Literature, Trinity College Hapke's book, remarkable in scope and inclusiveness, offers those concerned with American working people a mine of information...
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, professor of American Studies, University of Texas, Austin Labor's Text sets over 150 years of the multi-ethnic literature of work in the context of the history that informed it...
