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This essay explores Anthony Trollope's engagement with excess sweat as a metaphor encoding a complicated nexus of cultural attitudes towards class, gender, and inheritance in Victorian fiction. Discussing Cousin Henry, a lesser-known text written towards the end of Trollope's career, I posit that scholarly readings of Trollope's concerns with inheritance laws can be further complicated by closely examining the function of sweat as a somatic signifier. Through close readings of the primary text, I consider the function of sweat as both a potent physical symbol and a narrative device destabilizing Victorian understandings of gender and class in relation to inheritance law. Cousin Henry questions the extent to which free will and individual character can ever be fully self-determined in a society so dependent on legal and bureaucratic frameworks to produce and endorse identity. Trollope explores, in 1879, the crucial role of the threateningly abject body in undermining restrictive systems of regulation and control, anticipating work by authors of the Victorian fin-de-siècle in ways that have yet to be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes how Helena María Viramontes' novel "Their Dogs Came With Them" articulates East Los Angeles, California through the use of imagery, memory, and movement. It argues that the novel presents multiple experiences of the city which reveal the way the geography affects the community and the ways the Latino community can resist the erasive consequences of race and class by forming independent spatial meaning. It deals with the metaphor that binds the characters to their environment. It analyzes the theme of memory and its impermanence relating to the fractured nature of the city and its disruptive freeways. It also examines what it calls the tactile apprehension in the different modes and velocities of transportation as concurrent but divergent modes of articulation.

Discusses the bias in American studies toward the multicultural questions of gender, race and ethnicity at the expense of analyses of social class. Poverty's occupation of American writers as a literary theme; Theory of poverty to help in interpreting modes of literary production that have grappled integrally with the ethical, cultural, and linguistic difficulties of defining poverty as a substantive category of social being.

Establishes the critical place of housewifery in the emerging discourses of English nationalism, as discussed in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' and 'The Merry Wives of Windsor.' Representation of 'consumption' of something designated as popular by different social groups in dramatic plays; Connections among housewifery, class status and fairylore; Contradiction implicit in the image of a fairy servant in 'Merry Wives.'

The article discusses the roles of social class and grain in the medieval Welsh saga known as the Mabinogi, with a particular focus on passages related to the anti-hero Efnysien. Details on the economic and social significance of wheat, oats, barley, and bread are presented. According to the author, Efnysien's reference to flour in the text indicates his class awareness and his feelings of superiority towards his Irish enemies.

Examines three moments from three plays that stand as three variations on a familiar form of Shakesperean comic business: exchange between a social superior and his inferior wherein verbal misprision produces a comic impasse that momentarily renders the superior thwarted. Petruchio and Grumio in `The Taming of the Shrew'; Lorenzo and Launcelot in `The Merchant of Venice'; Flavius and Murellus and the workmen in `Julius Caesar.'