ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

Labor's Text traverses nearly two centuries of the U.S. literary response in fiction to workers and the work experience. Casting her net more broadly than any of her predecessors, Hapke's revision of the genre includes many recent writings not usually recognized as part of the tradition. Coming at a moment when there is a steady increase in interest about 'class' from color- and gender-inflected perspectives, this is a work of committed scholarship that may well prove to be a crucial compass to reorient the thinking and scholarship of a new generation. — Alan Wald, author of Writing from the Left

Hapke's book, remarkable in scope and inclusiveness, offers those concerned with American working people a mine of information about and the analysis of the 'rich lived history of American laborers' as that has been represented in fiction of every kind. She provides an invaluable foundation for understanding the dirtiest of American's dirty bug secrets: the preservation of class differences, class discrimination, indeed of class conflict in this, the wealthiest nation in history. Hers is an indispensable guided tour through more than a century and a half of literary representations of 'hands' at their looms, pickets on the line, agitators on their soapboxes, ordinary working women, men, and children in kitchens, parks, factories, and fields across America. — Paul Lauter, A.K. & G.M. Smith Professor of Literature, Trinity College

Labor's Text sets over 150 years of multi-ethnic literature of work in the context of the history that informed it - the history of labor organizing, of industrial change, of social transformations, and of shifting political alignments. Any scholar or student of American literature of American history cannot help but be enlightened by this boldly ambitious and illuminating book.— Shelly Fisher Fishkin, professor of American studies, University of Texas, Austin

A stunning work of scholarship... It is an extraordinary achievement and an immense contribution to working-class studies.— Janet Zandy, author of Calling Home: Working-Class Women's Writings

This skillful survey introduces us to Bowery B'hoys and Rivetheads, sinning seamstresses and proletarian mothers, blackfaces and multicultural visages, and fictional representations of legendary activists, like Clara Lemlich and Cesar Chavez, with passion and elegance. — Eileen Boris, author of Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States

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