Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores the role that representations of poor white people play in shaping both middle-class American identity and major American literary movements and genres across the long twentieth century. Jolene Hubbs reveals that, more often than not, poor white characters imagined by middle-class writers embody what better-off people are anxious to distance themselves from in a given moment. Poor white southerners are cast as social climbers during the status-conscious Gilded Age, country rubes in the modern era, racist obstacles to progress during the civil rights struggle, and junk food devotees in the health-conscious 1990s. Hubbs illuminates how Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, and Barbara Robinette Moss swam against these tides, pioneering formal innovations with an eye to representing poor white characters in new ways.

Popular American fiction has now secured a routine position in the higher education classroom despite its historic status as culturally suspect. This newfound respect and inclusion have almost certainly changed the pedagogical landscape, and Teaching Tainted Lit explores that altered terrain. If the academy has historically ignored, or even sneered at, the popular, then its new accommodation within the framework of college English is noteworthy: surely the popular introduces both pleasures and problems that did not exist when faculty exclusively taught literature from anestablished "high" canon. How, then, does the assumption that the popular matters affect teaching strategies, classroom climates, and both personal and institutional notions about what it means to study literature? The essays in this collection presume that the popular is here to stay and that its instructive implications are not merely noteworthy,but richly nuanced and deeply compelling. They address a broad variety of issues concerning canonicity, literature, genre, and theclassroom, as its contributors teach everything from Stephen King and Lady Gaga to nineteenthcentury dime novels and the 1852bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is no secret that teaching popular texts fuels controversies about the value of cultural studies, the alleged relaxation of aestheticstandards, and the possible "dumbing down" of Americans. By implicitly and explicitly addressing such contentious issues, these essays invite a broader conversation about the place of thepopular not only in higher education but in the reading lives of all Americans.