Description: Lori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture by analyzing previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature, showing how white, African American, and Mexican American factory workers, seamstresses, domestic workers, and prostitutes understood themselves while forging class identity.
Review Quotes: "[Archives of Labor] is a remarkable feat of original research and suggests routes for further study - not least on formal innovation and tone in antebellum literature."--Stephanie Kelley "TLS"