Description:
Reconstructs the surprising, self-interested, at times paradoxical attempts of Victorian novelists to define the limits of middle-class status
Brief description: Albert D. Pionke is the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor of English and Associate Dean of General Education and Academic Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama.
Review Quotes:
Essential reading for Victorianists, this book gives a powerful and illuminating account of the novel's role in defining the middle class. Set against birth and wealth, force and fact, desire and authority - the middle class, Pionke shows us, was knowable only by way of its others
--Caroline Levine, Cornell University