Description: Posits social class as the American political unconscious, showing (in an analysis of 19th and 20th century novels) how class exerts pressure on the American cultural imagination, and claiming that what is desired is ultimately the liberation from work.
Review Quotes: "Rob Seguin's Around Quitting Time makes a major contribution to discussions of class formation in the United States. His original readings of novels by Dreiser, Cather, West, and Barth brilliantly pursue the ghostly tracks of social and cultural change as they are rendered in fine narrative and linguistic detail within the domain of the literary. His mode of reading is as significant as his argument about the "classlessness" of the middle class. Indeed, Seguin demonstrates in exemplary fashion that it is possible to attend to literature as a social and political force without neglecting the specificity of its aesthetic work."--Jan Radway, Duke University