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"The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. 'I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,' wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois 'opinions and ideals' -- what are they?" Thus begins Franco Moretti's study of the bourgeois in modern European literature -- a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti's gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords -- "useful" and "earnest," "efficiency," "influence," "comfort," "roba"-- and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the "working master" of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the "national malformations" of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen's twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance. -- Publisher's website.

Middle class in literature. --- Social values in literature. --- Middle class in literature --- Social values in literature --- Middle classes in literature

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In The Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed the economic for the psychological or the spiritual. Reading works by Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others, he shows how both the form and content of postwar fiction responded to the transformation of the American middle class from small property owners to white-collar employees. In the process, he produces "compelling new accounts of identity politics and postmodernism that will be of interest to anyone who reads or teaches contemporary fiction. Hoberek argues that despite the financial gains and job security enjoyed by the postwar middle class, the transition to white-collar employment paved the way for its current precarious state in a country marked by increasingly deep class divisions. Postwar fiction provided the middle class with various imaginative substitutes for its former property-owning independence, substitutes that since then have not only allowed but abetted this class's downward mobility. To read this fiction in the light of the middle-class experience is thus not only to restore the severed connections between literary and economic "history in the second half of the twentieth "century, but to explore the roots of the contemporary crisis of the middle class.

White collar workers in literature. --- World War, 1939-1945 --- Literature and society --- Middle class in literature. --- American fiction --- Middle classes in literature --- Literature and the war. --- History --- History and criticism.

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The Other Rise of the Novel relies on new research concerning the relevance of bourgeois values and ideals in the early modern period in France to question the extent to which characters in works of fiction portray the rise of individualistic and self-interested behavior. It argues that novels like Manon Lescaut, Lettres d'une Péruvienne, and La Nouvelle Héloïse produce their own alternative economies, different articulations of how individuals should define their relations to others.

French fiction --- Social classes in literature. --- Middle class in literature. --- Literature and society --- History and criticism. --- History --- Literature --- Literature and sociology --- Society and literature --- Sociology and literature --- Sociolinguistics --- Middle classes in literature --- Social aspects

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Thus, the late eighteenth century proves to be a watershed moment in home's conceptual life, one that produced a remarkably rich and complex set of cultural ideas and images. A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

Literature and society --- English literature --- Poverty --- Social structure --- Nationalism in literature. --- Middle class in literature. --- English fiction --- Home in literature. --- Literature --- Literature and sociology --- Society and literature --- Sociology and literature --- Sociolinguistics --- Destitution --- Wealth --- Basic needs --- Begging --- Poor --- Subsistence economy --- Organization, Social --- Social organization --- Anthropology --- Sociology --- Social institutions --- Middle classes in literature --- History --- Scottish authors --- History and criticism. --- Government policy --- Social aspects

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Analyzes the transformation of German-language pastoral from a portrayal of the idyllic lives of herdsmen into a vehicle for the concerns and aspirations of the middle class.

German literature --- Pastoral literature, German --- Middle class in literature. --- Country life in literature. --- Middle classes in literature --- Young Germany --- German pastoral literature --- History and criticism. --- German authors. --- German culture. --- German-language writing. --- creative middle class. --- cultural transformation. --- literary analysis. --- literary themes. --- literary transformation. --- literature and society. --- middle class. --- pastoral literature. --- pastoral transformation. --- societal aspirations. --- societal changes. --- societal values.