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An essay is presented on the literary constructions of the two post-war working-class British novels "A Kestrel for a Knave" by Barry Hines and "So Long, Hector Bebb" by Ron Berry. Topics discussed include speculative reading of the ideas of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the body and subjectivity, and the ideological interpellation and theoretical perspective of the identity.

While conventional wisdom posits a definition of capital grounded in processes of abstraction that efface the particularities of laboring bodies, the history of capitalism betrays a social reality wherein the valorizing of capital necessitates the continual deployment of race-making and gendering technologies to maximize profits and safeguard exploitative conditions of production. Through a reading of Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus, this essay examines the foundational relationship that exists between capital accumulation and the social production of difference. In her novel, Viramontes expressly condemns the racist and sexist predatory operations of capital on the laboring body, deliberately foregrounding the significance of racial and gender divisions to capitalist accumulation. Under the Feet of Jesus juxtaposes the concrete social particularities of the laboring body to the abstracting and objectifying forces of the capital relation, thus exposing the intrinsic racial and gender inequalities that constitute the foundations for capitalist profit-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When discussing Edith Wharton's ghost stories, scholars tend to emphasize themes of repressed sexuality and gender, in particular the struggles of women to overcome the traditional roles that threaten to imprison them. While sexual and gender politics undoubtedly inhabit the haunted space of Wharton's stories, a remarkable number of the stories also exhibit anxiety over money and class. In some of the ghost stories, this anxiety is plainly visible, reflecting Wharton's sharp critique of the corrupt nouveau riches and the decaying aristocracy. In other tales, however, less noticed ghosts expose the depth of Wharton's anxiety over class power and inherited money, raising uncomfortable questions about the legitimacy of the class system on which Wharton depended for her own wealth. A close examination of the ghost stories reveals Wharton's participation in and response to America's anxious debate over wealth and class during the rapidly changing economic landscape of the early twentieth-century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how constructions of womanhood and femininity affect the working-class encounter with the academy in three early to mid-twentieth-century American novels that feature female protagonists: Agnes Smedley's "Daughter of Earth," Alexander Saxton's "The Great Midland" and Anzia Yezierska's "Bread Givers." Each of these novels weaves together a narrative of desire for education and desire for love. While these women are trying to obtain upward class mobility through education rather than marriage, and while Smedley and Saxton's novels contain the added element of involvement in Socialist and Communist politics, all three protagonists end up unable to escape the romance plot. Taken together, these novels offer valuable insights into the gendered nature of class mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]