Around quitting time : work and middle-class fantasy in American fiction

Resource Information

The work Around quitting time : work and middle-class fantasy in American fiction represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Around quitting time : work and middle-class fantasy in American fiction

Title remainder

work and middle-class fantasy in American fiction

Statement of responsibility

Robert Seguin

Creator

• Seguin, Robert, 1963-
• Seguin, Robert, 1963-

Subject

• Fantasy in literature
• Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 20th century
• Middle class in literature
• American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
• United States -- Social conditions -- 20th century
• Work in literature
• Working class in literature
• Social change in literature
• Class consciousness in literature

Language

eng

Summary

"Virtually since its inception, the United States has nurtured a dreamlike and often delirious image of itself as an essentially classless society. Given the stark levels of social inequality that have actually existed and that continue today, what sustains this at once hopelessly ideological and breathlessly utopian mirage? In Around Quitting Time Robert Seguin investigates this question, focusing on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America." "Tracing connections between the reconstruction of the labor process and the aesthetic dilemmas of modernism, between the emergence of the modern state and the structure of narrative, Seguin analyzes the work of Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Barth, and others. These fictional narratives serve to demonstrate for Seguin the pattern of social sites and cultural phenomena that have emerged where work and leisure, production and consumption, and activity and passivity coincide. He reveals how, by creating pathways between these seemingly opposed domains, the middle-class imaginary at once captures and suspends the dynamics of social class and opens out onto a political and cultural terrain where class is both omnipresent and invisible. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET

Cataloging source

DLC

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

New Americanists