This chapter on the Victorian bildungsroman focuses on moments when a heroine pleasurably and passively flies, floats, or is carried into a larger social world. It focuses on episodes from Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Rather than developing a life that establishes her individuality, I argue that the heroine of the bildungsroman gets swept up in an emotion that unites her with a social ingroup. This emotion deeply fulfills the heroine, meeting ordinarily unmet needs for social relatedness and self-esteem. After analyzing the novels, the chapter describes acts of reading through which women and working-class readers affiliate with like-minded others. These include readers who see themselves as part of a group of ardent Dorothea Brookes or fiery Jane Eyres and also working-class readers who felt transported by books that connected them to other book-lovers.

This chapter analyses the place of class in O’Casey’s thinking and focuses in particular on a relatively unknown O’Casey script from 1919, The Harvest Festival, which revolves around a charismatic worker-hero who dies when a strike becomes violent. The chapter also examines the rewritten version of that play, Red Roses for Me (1943), in order to explore how O’Casey’s aestheticizing of class confrontation was developed and refined. The chapter shows how O’Casey wanted class analysis to replace ideologies like religion and nationalism, which he believed to be misdirections of humanity’s important longings.

This chapter examines O’Casey’s plays in the context of Irish historical revisionism, examining whether the cynicism towards nationalism that O’Casey expressed in the 1920s can really be seen as an example of revisionism avant la lettre. The chapter situates O’Casey’s views in relation to the work of Father Francis Shaw and R. F. Foster, and looks at the critique of O’Casey offered in 1926 by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. But the chapter argues that O’Casey was not seeking to evaluate the historical record in a dispassionate way. Rather, O’Casey sought to endorse a class-conscious socialist republic, and to show in his drama the way that the existing class system might use and abuse individual capability.

The radical, working-class political movements of the nineteenth century found Percy Shelley’s work quite useful. His poetry was quoted, reprinted, and set to song by Chartists in the 1840s and 1850s and by socialists near the century’s close. These activists selected a particular version of Shelley. They memorised, shared, and reprinted the poems – like Queen Mab, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, and ‘Song: To the Men of England’ – that were, on the one hand, most available and affordable, and, on the other hand, most conducive to collective political action. Chartist editors, political orators, and socialist songwriters all strategically excerpted these poems, avoiding Shelley’s profound reservations about revolutionary action and transforming his work to serve their own political purposes. Across the nineteenth century, working-class activists collaboratively constructed a Shelley of their own.

Workers’ rights and conditions have not been at the core of the Islamic Republic’s main policies, especially from the 1990s onward. The existent labor law offers far-reaching exemptions and loopholes that make it possible to circumvent workers’ rights, while prohibitions on independent unions deprive workers of the legal tools to claim their rights. This chapter gives a detailed analysis of the evolution of labor regulation and reform in postrevolutionary Iran, building on primary research and interviews with industrial workers, scholars, and legal experts, conducted in Iran. In particular, the chapter demonstrates how, from Rafsanjani’s neoliberal turn to Rouhani’s presidency, labor casualization and job insecurity have gradually – and systematically – undermined working conditions, exposing workers to severe exploitation and limiting their legal protection. The presidents’ policies have not been equally detrimental, as the values behind every administration, as well as the general economic contexts, influenced their choices: from Rafsanjani’s market-oriented rhetoric to Khatami’s participatory narrative of civil society, Ahmadinejad’s conservative populism to Rouhani’s business-friendly pragmatism.

Florence Boos examines the proliferation of working-class writing in a variety of genres – poetry, fiction, autobiography, and journalism – at a time when there was a significant middle-class interest in forms of working-class culture. This led to the financing and production of publications such as Howitt’s and People’s Journal, Eliza Cook’s Journal, The Literature of Working Men, and the Dundee-based People’s Journal. The broadly class-based nature of the pervasive violence of the period is acknowledged here as a given in works which experiment with form in order to represent the authenticity of the working-class experience. As Boos concludes, ‘an integration of these writings into our conceptions of Victorian authorship can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the latter, as well as greater appreciation of the unique contributions of mid-century British working-class writers to the literary representation of the social issues of their time’.

College access does not begin or end with an acceptance letter; it continues throughout students’ college experiences, especially for first-generation, working-class Latinx students who are experiencing many college milestones for the first time. It is predicted by scholars that the rapid growth of the Latinx population will make them a large college applicant pool in the near future. These predictions show that retention efforts for Latinx students are an important investment for institutions of higher education. However, support for Latinx first-generation, working-class college students is often lacking at universities. In this conceptual chapter, we center on first-generation, working-class Latinx students of immigrant origin and the identity intersections experienced by individual students to equip administrators, academic advisors, and university data analysts with the knowledge to improve Latinx student success efforts through an overview of (1) academic advising, (2) data analytics, (3) social class, and (4) theories and frameworks related to the identity intersections of Latinx students.

Although Spanish-speaking lands are often imagined as lands of sexual intolerance, Buenos Aires is better characterized by ineffectual repression and by its recent celebration of sexual diversity. In this chapter we analyze sexuality in Buenos Aires against the backdrop of economic, socio-demographic, cultural, and political transformations that often undermined the regulations of authorities. The decades between 1880, when Buenos Aires became the capital, and the overthrow of President Juan Perón in 1955 were crucial for the formation of modern Argentina and constitute its focus. We begin with some preceding historical trends in the colonial and early independent era, and end with a succinct analysis of a few salient trends after 1955, especially those leading to Buenos Aires becoming a leader of LGBTQ+ rights in the twenty-first century. We discuss immigration, class differences in sexual behaviours, commercialized sex, sexual diversity with marica and homosexual identities, the rise of family sociability, and the push for sexual ‘normalcy’.

Class has been crucial both to how individuals have experienced their desires and to how those desires have been interpreted, categorized, and articulated. This chapter offers an overview of the intersectional relationship between class and sexuality and demonstrates that the nuances of class difference and division, across continents and within regions of the same country, could drastically alter the lived experience of sexual desire. Class influenced notions of private and public spaces and the impact these had on sexual activity. Class differences mixed with racial differences also determined ideas of sexual respectability or sexual danger, both on an individual level with the erotic appeal of class differences and on a group level in eugenics. Class divisions have also been significant in shaping how the history of sexuality has been written, since it has shaped the nature of archival sources. The example of English author Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) demonstrates these themes.

Most people in most societies do not fall into the four problematic categories of populists, extremists, deniers, and authoritarians. It is important to consider deliberation involving everybody else in these diabolical times. We could then get a deliberative democracy and a citizenry that are robust in the face of the threats to democracy and that can join in with deliberation against these threats. Equally important in light of the specific concerns we have raised in the previous four chapters, truly inclusive and effective public deliberation should reduce the proportion of people who, out of despair at the democratic alternatives, find themselves attracted to the four problematic positions. This includes allegiant citizens satisfied with existing democratic institutions, dissatisfied citizens, and critical citizens who want to participate more. We then turn to categories of people whose voice ought to be facilitated more effectively in public deliberation, including the working class, women, and marginalized cultural groups. Different deliberative forms are likely to attract different kinds of citizens, which suggests a variety of differentiated practices ranging from contestatory deliberation to more constructive and respectful deliberation oriented to the common good, all of which can join active resistance to anti-democratic transgressions and contribute to democratic renewal.

This chapter assesses the interplay among social class and the growing centralization of African American literature in the marketplace. Since the 1980s the production of black literature has been increasingly shaped by the economic and aesthetic priorities of commercial bookselling. Contemporary African American writers have expressed their awareness of the ways that the commodification of black literary expression has both imposed limits and created new possibilities for literary art. These authors have been particularly attentive to new patterns of consumption and reception that emphasize class distinctions among consumers and genres of writing. These changes have prompted writers to rethink traditional assumptions about the social and aesthetic obligations of black middle-class writers in forging alliances with the working class. The chapter considers these shifting social relations with reference to literary works by Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Mat Johnson, Claudia Rankine, and Colson Whitehead.

This chapter focuses on the cantonment of Rawalpindi and its associated hill station of Murree, where we see working-class and elite ideas about family, respectability, sexuality, and race collide. Across British India, men, women, and children of different classes and races were thrown together in army cantonments. Military policy coded the physical spaces that comprised the cantonment – the Army barracks and civil lines, mess halls and married soldiers’ quarters, bazaars, and red-light districts – as sites of potential dissolution, destructive to British prestige. Thousands of soldiers, officers, camp followers, and army wives passed through these installations. As they did so, they created domestic worlds within militarized spaces. Domestication of military space did not, however, assuage official fears about the destructive potential of a population of non-elite whites, but rather expanded those fears to encompass not only single men but also families and children.

In most democracies, politicians tend to be vastly better off than the citizens they represent: They are wealthier, more educated, and less likely to come from working-class jobs (e.g., Best 2007; Best and Cotta 2000; Carnes and Lupu 2015; Matthews 1985). Scholars have recently taken a renewed interest in this longstanding phenomenon. Some have studied the symbolic or normative implications of the shortage of politicians from the working class (e.g., Arnesen and Peters 2018; Barnes and Saxton 2019; Mansbridge 2015). Others have focused on policy: Just as the shortage of female and racial minority politicians can affect policies related to gender and race (e.g., Bratton and Ray 2002; Franck and Rainer 2012; Pande 2003; Swers 2002), the shortage of working-class politicians – who tend to be more leftist on economic issues – seems to bias taxing and spending policies towards the more conservative positions affluent citizens tend to favor (Carnes and Lupu 2015; Kirkland 2018; Kraus and Callaghan 2014; Micozzi 2018; O’Grady 2019; Rosset 2016; Szakonyi 2016; 2019; but see Lloren, Rosset, and Wüest 2015).