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Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and
cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of
resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far
more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as
reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Through the concept of class shame, she
produces a model of working-class subjectivity that understands
resistance in a more accurate and useful way-as a complicated kind
of refusal, directed at both dominated and dominant culture. With a
focus on certain classics in the working-class literary "canon,"
such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Love on the Dole,
as well as lesser-known texts by working-class women, Fox uncovers
the anxieties that underlie representations of class and
consciousness. Shame repeatedly emerges as a powerful counterforce
in these works, continually unsettling the surface narrative of
protest to reveal an ambivalent relation toward the working-class
identities the novels apparently champion. Class Fictions offers an
equally rigorous analysis of cultural studies itself, which has
historically sought to defend and value the radical difference of
working-class culture. Fox also brings to her analysis a strong
feminist perspective that devotes considerable attention to the
often overlooked role of gender in working-class fiction. She
demonstrates that working-class novels not only expose master
narratives of middle-class culture that must be resisted, but that
they also reveal to us a need to create counter narratives or
formulas of working-class life. In doing so, this book provides a
more subtle sense of the role of resistance in working class
culture. While of interest to scholars of Victorian and
working-class fiction, Pamela Fox's argument has far-reaching
implications for the way literary and cultural studies will be
defined and practiced.
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