Class is the Measure

Reviewed by: Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Christina Lupton Melvyn New Christina Lupton. Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania, 2012. Pp. xi + 184. $55. It is difficult to escape the first twentyfive pages of this study, because they raise so many important questions about the work of many eighteenth-century scholars since the turn of the century. Thus, for example, when Ms. Lupton asserts in her first paragraph that literature that “reflects critically on the economic and material production” of itself is the “most typical kind of mid-century writing of all,” we immediately wonder how this datum was arrived at. True, some writers do seem conscious of the fact that the Critical and Monthly reviewers stood ready to slash their works to [End Page 47] pieces, and so tried to disarm bad reviews with self-denigration. Does this differ, however, from writers of prefaces in Dryden’s day telling us they wrote at their leisure and published only at the insistence of friends? Are these not also tropes that reflect on the “economic and material production of literature,” as, indeed, does every dedication written, say, between Dryden’s generation and Pope’s? Ms. Lupton wants to tie this early observation to the ongoing and overcrowded, not to say trendy, discourse about materiality or “thing theory,” which, she observes, replaced the no longer trendy discourse about deconstruction. Both approaches share a desire to downplay (or ignore) the role of consciousness (or genius) in the production of literature. To her credit, she worries, as indeed she should, that these approaches “come across as being the result of our theoretical orientation. The history we recover appears only coincidentally recorded in texts themselves, and not as a phenomenon that was apparent to the writers and readers caught up in its development.” Unfortunately, she is never quite able to dispel this suspicion, despite her attempt to find some distance between herself and materialist readings by means of “mediation theory”—which seems to enable her to embrace two aspects of the books under study rejected by her earlier compatriots: the words on the page and the authorial consciousness that put them there. Thus, she opines, in words that sound familiar enough to a reader of Wimsatt and Warren: “We need to continue to read closely and describe texts that cultivate discursively the impression of understanding their own mediation.” Indeed, her revolution does seem a U-turn: “this book contributes indirectly to the argument that people do in fact control the technologies they use”; and “with close reading … the ability of print to overtake thought can be reclaimed as belonging to the realm of willful human construction and imagination.” The proof of the pudding is in the taste, but that takes us back to Ms. Lupton’s pudding, a collection of selected sentences from several minor authors of the period; to be sure minor (or taste, for that matter) is a term not used in materialist vocabularies, so it is our responsibility, if we are to weigh this book fairly, to have read Charlotte Summers, The Temple Beau, The Anti-Gallican, The Adventures of Captain Greenland, Lydia, and a dozen more longforgotten titles. Short of that, we may quibble by asking, first, how many books of this sort Ms. Lupton read that did not contain the sort of narrative voice she was looking for; and second, how central to the actual book are the quotations provided—that is, are they a sentence or two where a narrator surfaces within an ocean of text interested in other subjects, or are they actually representative of the fiction as a whole? Surely some of her reading failed to produce evidence for her thesis. What were the titles of those forgotten books and did they represent 20% or 49% of her total reading (one assumes at least 51% did contain what she was looking for, although perhaps not quite worthy of “most typical”). These are not, I trust, foolish quibbles, for the essence of this approach is to find within third- and fourth-rate authors sufficient material to discuss how first-rate authors may have been affected by...

Reviewed by: V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading Harveen Sachdeva Mann Selwyn R. Cudjoe . V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. 287 pp. $32.50 cloth; pb. $13.95. Selwyn Cudjoe's V. S. Naipaul is essential reading for serious students of Naipaul and aficionados of postcolonial literature more generally, for Naipaul's defenders and detractors alike, and for both First World and Third World critics. The first book-length assessment of Naipaul grounded in contemporary literary theory, V. S. Naipaul offers a "materialist" reading (one that locates the author's work in the politico-historical and sociocultural context of colonialism and postcolonialism) as a corrective to earlier "idealist" interpretations (those that neglected the ideological and cultural determinants of Naipaul's ouevre and saw only his technical virtuosity, not his limitations). A Trinidadian native, Cudjoe presents an extended analysis of what he terms Naipaul's "increasing identification with the dominant imperialist ideology and racist preoccupation of the time." Cudjoe's overall aim is polemical—to demonstrate to First World scholars and critics that despite Naipaul's ethnic and national background, he evinces a growing racism and misanthropy that invalidate his observations regarding postcolonial societies. Although Naipaul professes to be a "rootless" writer, "without a past, without ancestors," Cudjoe rightly contends that the impetus behind most of his writing is his ambivalent relationship with his original home, Trinidad; his work should therefore be studied in the context both of Caribbean literary and historical tradition and the larger field of postcolonial discourse. Basing his analyses on a thorough knowledge of West Indian literature and contemporary literary criticism—the theories of Freud and Bakhtin, Althusser and Williams, Lacan and Foucault, and Eagleton and Jameson, among others—and displaying considerable familiarity with Hindu philosophy, Cudjoe presents a close chronological reading of all of Naipaul's texts (except the 1989 travel book, A Turn in the South). He demonstrates the evolution of Naipaul's vision from a productive ambivalence toward the Third World in the early texts to what he deems a "morbid" self-preoccupation and "nihilistic" racism in the later ones. [End Page 389] The Introduction articulates Cudjoe's "materialist" aim and methodology (encompassing primarily psychoanalytic, Marxist/historical, and linguistic approaches), presents Third versus First World readings of Naipaul, and identifies the Caribbean context of Naipaul's writings. The thoroughness of Cudjoe's research is demonstrated early in Chapter One as he discusses Naipaul's short stories from the Miguel Street collection and the BBC Written Archives' holdings to delineate what were to become recurring themes in Naipaul's work: exile, the concomitant search for identity, and the tensions in the lives of Trinidadian East Indians between their Eastern past and increasingly Westernized present. Chapter Two investigates the social development of Trinidadian Hindus portrayed in The Mystic Masseur and their political dispossession depicted in The Suffrage of Elvira. A House for Mr Biswas is, Cudjoe admits, "the great realist novel of Caribbean literature"; Chapter Three concludes the examination of the first phase of Naipaul's writing by analyzing House as a prose tragedy that traces the emergence of Hindu feudal society into a nascent capitalist order. Chapter Four studies the second period of Naipaul's development—encompassing The Middle Passage, An Area of Darkness, and Mr Stone and the Knights Companion—during which, according to Cudjoe, Naipaul's ambivalence toward the Third World is replaced by admiration for the dominant colonialist-capitalist society and corresponding disdain for the colonized. Chapter Five examines "A Christmas Story," "A Flag on the Island," The Mimic Men, and The Loss of El Dorado in political as well as psychoanalytical terms to establish what Cudjoe sees as Naipaul's increasingly "savage manner" of describing the colonial and postcolonial condition. Drawing upon Freud and Lacan in particular, Cudjoe attributes Naipaul's depiction of mimicry and "psychic crampedness" in Mimic to his inability to progress beyond the "mirror stage" of development and to sever his "incestuous relationship with the mother (country)"; and Loss Cudjoe interprets as a "distorted," "ideological" interpretation of events rather than as an objective, scientific appraisal of Caribbean history. In Chapter Six, Cudjoe turns to Bakhtin's study of carnivalesque humor to prove...

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance. Katarzyna Lecky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. vi+277.

This thesis proceeds via a critique of the labour process debate and its central conception of "control" to the attempt to develop an alternative theory of the labour process based on an analysis of exploitation. This involves the use of a classical Marxist model of capitalist economics in which the primary objective of valorisation is emphasised as structuring the organisation of the contemporary labour process. Two aspects of this objective are invoked; that relating to the extraction of surplus value, in which both the intensification and abstraction of labour are noted as continuing tendencies in the development of the labour process, and that relating to the relationship between paid and unpaid labour time, in which the commodity status of labour is seen as central in integrating the issue of subsistence into the heart of the labour process itself. In locating these interlinked strands in the structuring of the labour process the thesis takes on two further tasks: firstly to demonstrate the centrality of contradictions within the capitalist labour process; and secondly to unite objective and subjective in the consideration of that labour process. This latter task shapes the third theme within the thesis , the analysis of worker response or "class consciousness". Our argument in this respect has focussed on the need to recognise worker response and resistance as centrally "economistic", but at the same time has indicated the political implications of such response. Empirical material from the two case studies undertaken within the thesis is presented in order to sustain this argument, along with a briefer survey of some published studies. Overall, the analysis holds that while worker response must be recognised as economistic rather than "control"-oriented, such response is rooted in the contradictions of the capitalist labour process,and can thus be understood as endemically undermining its structures

Classism plays a significant role in shaping social hierarchies within literary narratives, often revealing how power, privilege, and inequality operate across different historical contexts. This Research explore the illustration of class struggle and class consciousness in George Orwell’s Animal Farm using the Marxist theoretical framework of Karl Marx and Georg Lukács. Through a qualitative descriptive method, the researchers conducted a close reading of the novel and coded all relevant dialogues, speeches, and narrative events. The analysis identified 46 instances of class struggle and 28 instances of class consciousness, illustrating how the pigs gradually monopolize power, exploit ideology, and suppress the working animals. The findings reveal that Orwell’s portrayal of class conflict reflects Marx’s concept of the proletariat’s exploitation by the ruling class, while the animals’ shifting awareness demonstrates both the emergence and erosion of class consciousness. Key speeches from Old Major articulate the origins of oppression and inspire revolutionary awareness, whereas the pigs’ later manipulation exposes how revolutions fail when ideology is controlled by a new elite. Overall, the study shows that Animal Farm not only critiques totalitarianism but also depicts the cyclical nature of classism, emphasizing how power can corrupt revolutionary ideals and restore hierarchical structures unless true class consciousness is sustained

List of Illustrations. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Anatomy of Reading. (Books Bibliomania Bodies). 1. A History of Reading. (From Reading Aloud to Reading Silently From Monastic to Scholastic Reading Reading in Solitude From Intensive to Extensive Reading). 2. The Material Conditions of Reading. (Expressive Function of Print Instability of the Textual Object Histories of Textual Transmission From Manuscript to Typographic Culture from Print to Hypermedia Culture). 3. The Physiology of Consumption. (Side-effects of Reading Reading-Fever Reading Addiction Modernity and the Assault on the Senses Eye-Strain and Eye-Hunger Film-Fever Dazzling the Audience Dizzy in Hyperspace (Dis)Embodied in Cyberspace Passive Consumers). 4. The Reader in Fiction. (Dangers of Reading The Tearful Reader The Frightened Reader The Passionate Reader Pathology of Reading Reading Games The Danger of a Future without Books Multisensory Media). 5. The Role of Affect in Literary Criticism. (Reading with/out Pathos Docere-Delectare-Movere From Reader to Author to Text Disinterested and Contemplative Reading Close Reading Reading for Sense rather than Sensation). 6. The Reader in Theory. (Un/Readability A Priori Conditions of Reading Controlling Readers' Responses Reading Expectations Conventions of Reading Interpretive Communities Failure of Reading Misreading The Reader as Writer The Politics of Difference). 7. Sexual Politics of Reading. (The Resisting Reader Black Women Readers Empirical Audiences Active Consumers Low-/Middle-/Highbrow Reading Embodied Reading Reading as/like a Woman The Feminisation of the Reader). Conclusion: Materialist Readings. Notes. References and Bibliography. Index

Previous articleNext article No AccessFocus on Latin AmericaPaulo Freire as Secretary of Education in the Municipality of São PauloCarlos Alberto TorresCarlos Alberto Torres Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 38, Number 2May, 1994 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/447241 Views: 9Total views on this site Citations: 18Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1994 The Comparative and International Education SocietyPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Sonia Nieto Reimagining Teacher Education to Promote Relationships of Caring and Advocacy, (Jul 2019): 489–503.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119236788.ch26Peter Mayo Paulo Freire and the Debate on Lifelong Learning, (Jul 2019): 535–549.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119236788.ch29Walter Omar Kohan Paulo Freire and Philosophy for Children: A Critical Dialogue, Studies in Philosophy and Education 37, no.66 (May 2018): 615–629.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9613-8Tricia Niesz, Aaron M. Korora, Christy Burke Walkuski, Rachel E. Foot Social Movements and Educational Research: Toward a United Field of Scholarship, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education 120, no.33 (Mar 2018): 1–41.https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811812000305Guy Burton Flaying Freire? The Workers’ Party and education policy in Brazil, 1980–2007, International Review of Education 58, no.11 (Jan 2012): 91–108.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-012-9262-zJohn Dale, Emery J. Hyslop-Margison Metaphors, Politics, and Biography, (Sep 2010): 33–69.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9100-0_2Irving Epstein Sports As a Metaphor for Comparative Inquiry, (Jan 2011): 93–112.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-722-6_6P. Mayo Adult Learning, Instruction and Programme Planning: Insights from Freire, (Jan 2010): 31–35.https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-044894-7.00001-4Carmel Borg, Peter Mayo Challenges for Critical Pedagogy: A Southern European Perspective, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 6, no.11 (Feb 2006): 143–154.https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708605282809Robert C. Williamson Education: A Continuing Challenge, (Jan 2006): 195–228.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09592-3_9Carlos Alberto Torres The State, Privatisation and Educational Policy: A critique of neo-liberalism in Latin America and some ethical and political implications, Comparative Education 38, no.44 (Nov 2002): 365–385.https://doi.org/10.1080/0305006022000030766Cesar Augusto Rossatto Social Transformation and “Popular Schooling” in Brazil, Childhood Education 77, no.66 (Sep 2001): 367–374.https://doi.org/10.1080/00094056.2001.10521672Peter Mayo Remaining on the Same Side of the River: A Critical Commentary on Paulo Freire's Later Work, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 22, no.44 (Aug 2006): 369–397.https://doi.org/10.1080/1071441000220404Ana Canen The Challenges of Conducting an Ethnographic Case Study of a United Kingdom Teacher Education Institution, Journal of Teacher Education 50, no.11 (Jan 1999): 50–56.https://doi.org/10.1177/002248719905000106Peter Mayo Tribute to Paulo Freire (1921‐1997), International Journal of Lifelong Education 16, no.55 (Sep 1997): 365–370.https://doi.org/10.1080/0260137970160502Peter Mayo Critical literacy and emancipatory politics: The work of Paulo Freire, International Journal of Educational Development 15, no.44 (Oct 1995): 363–379.https://doi.org/10.1016/0738-0593(95)00021-TMaría Pilar O'Cadiz, Carlos Alberto Torres Literacy, Social Movements, and Class Consciousness: Paths from Freire and the São Paulo Experience, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 25, no.33 (Sep 1994): 208–225.https://doi.org/10.1525/aeq.1994.25.3.04x0140jCarlos Alberto Torres, Gustavo Fischman Popular education: Building from experience, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 1994, no.6363 (Jan 1994): 81–92.https://doi.org/10.1002/ace.36719946309

BOURGEOIS CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS, as far as it had awakened at all in the [eighteenth] century, found its culmination, so to speak, in Emilia Galotti.' Ever since the Marxist critic Franz Mehring first advanced this argument in 1894, the question of whether a revolutionary class consciousness is at work in Lessing's drama has been a major topic for students of eighteenth-century German literature. Luk'acs, for example, also viewed Lessing's play as a historic confrontation between characters and an absolute monarchy ... condemned to revolutionary destruction.2 Later critics have tended to modify and refine earlier Marxist readings of Emilia Galotti as a straightforward indictment of autocratic monarchy, embodied in the figure of the Prince. Interpretations have begun to stress the sympathetic side of the Prince's character, while exposing the political and ideological failings of the proto-bourgeois or pseudo-bourgeois or bourgeois manque family of the Galottis. But whether the blame for the tragic events of the story is placed on the bourgeois or the aristocratic side, discussions of the play that are at all concerned with its political implications have consistently

Metadrama and Language (Language and Metadrama in <i>Major Barbara</i> and <i>Pygmalion:</i> Shavian Sisters)

This paper aims to bring to the fore the plight of women in Nigeria, particularly in Igbo land in a manner that proposes a paradigm shift. The issue of men setting the standards for women has been a dominant global discourse. However, this paper focuses on the Nigerian situation, while making references to feminist criticism in general. The status of women being seen but not heard, lacking significance, dignity, and personality and being unable to contribute meaningfully to decision-making in the home and community have been foregrounded in the works of Mariama Ba, Ama-Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, and also, Diasporic African female novelists such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Houston among several others. The current study uses the Womanist Theory to engage the politics of sexism as well as class consciousness as crucial interlocking factors in the narrative of Buchi Emecheta. The research methodology adopted is qualitative. When African women’s books are studied, it is usually in the context of Black Literature, which largely ignores the implications of sexual politics. Feminist scholars and critics have raised concerns regarding the stereotyping of the presentation of gender roles and gender assignments in African Literature. This lopsided representation of the African woman is what some female writers have risen up to dispel. Buchi Emecheta in her epic novel, The Joys of Motherhood, has undertaken to present the domestic lives of women in a gender-charged and predominantly patriarchal Igbo society.

Using survey data from Russian villages, this article examines the development of a rural class structure in postcommunist Russia. It is argued that as a result of market reforms, social and economic relations have evolved beyond stratification, and that, rather, a rural class structure is emerging. Five measures of an emerging class structure are posited: income stratification, land holdings, capital stock, class consciousness, and shared attitudes and values. Focusing on upper and lower income strata, significant differences are documented for each measure. The economic and political implications of the findings are discussed.

The objective of this article is to propose a Marxist reading of Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) and to analyse the them-us contradiction through a close reading of the subjective experiences of the protagonist, Billy, in order to put forward that the antagonism between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is, despite the fact that it seems to comply with the Marxist conception of class and class consciousness, perceived more in cultural and personal terms than in economic terms. The article suggests that the lack of a class-conscious approach based on the exploiter and the exploited is, as in the case of Billy and his defiant and self-centred reactions to the world of ‘them’, unable to lead to a radical transformation of the money-oriented world, capitalism, and that this, on the contrary, interpellates Billy, a fictional representative of the socio-historical reality of the English working class, into the totality of the social relations of production and materialises the hegemonic and reductionist politics of power relations. This process will, over the course of the article, be referred to as the process of ‘them’isation.

This research applies Norman Fairclough's model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to critically analyze the themes of marginalization and social injustice in William Blake's The Chimney Sweeper. The research qualitatively analyzes both versions of the poem, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake. This study employs a close reading of both the texts in order to find out the forms that power constructions around issues of child labor, class exploitation, and religious ideologies in 18th-century England take, using CDA in three stages: textual analysis, discursive practice, and social practice. From the textual analysis, metaphors, symbolism, imagery, and irony are used in order to symbolize both literal and figurative entrapment into child labor, disparity, and marginalization. The change from the voice of innocence to the voice of experience reflects the growth in class consciousness and institutionalized criticism of power. The discursive practice stage unpacks how Blake condemns the role church and state play in the role of maintaining social stratification and exploitation of labor, stripping to light the religious discourse that makes the oppressed meek. Social practice analysis highlights how Blake's poetry acts as resistance to the broader social systems that function as models of exploitation and fall in line with institutional practices of exclusion. Thus, Blake's use of language is not simply a reflection of social injustice but rather a critique and call for reform. This shows that the issues that Blake portrays in his writing are indeed the issues that society is concerned about today regarding debates over labor rights and institutional power. It can therefore be argued that language has the capability of questioning social inequality and marginalization.

Reviewed by: A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London by Scott Oldenburg Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (bio) A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London Scott Oldenburg Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. vii + 275 pp. $99.95 cloth. William Muggins is far from a canonical poet, and Scott Oldenburg's absorbing study of his life and work serves as a powerful argument for the value of investigating obscure authors and marginal texts. A weaver by trade, Muggins authored a 1603 printed pamphlet called London's Mourning Garment, comprised of a 679-line elegiac poem about plague-time London, a prose prayer, and a list of fatalities by parish for four months in 1603. Oldenburg ends the book with a short profile of one of Muggins's early readers, a soldier living during the Great Plague of 1665–1666, and notes that this reader must have found comfort in Muggins's pamphlet despite medical and social advances since the early seventeenth century. Little did Oldenburg know how relevant a work written in quarantine during a time of widespread illness would be once again in 2020. Limited evidence makes Oldenburg hesitant to call A Weaver-Poet and the Plague a biography. Instead, he considers it to be "part literary criticism, part microhistory" (38). It indeed attends to the micro: one little-known writer, one short text, and one brief period of time (1595-1603). Yet the book uses its narrow focus to cover much broader terrain, offering important insights into the lives of craftsmen, early modern London, a radically Protestant parish, lived experiences during the plague, and the middling sort. For Oldenburg, Muggins is only one example of a class of writers he calls "weaver-poets" (15) including John Careless and Thomas Deloney. He argues that the early moderns associated weaving with poetry and weavers with poverty and zealous Protestantism, making Muggins and other weavers uniquely appropriate spokesmen for social reform. Oldenburg's introduction includes a helpful section on methodology that could serve as a model for future scholars interested in uncovering less-documented lives. Oldenburg uses parish records, wills, records of the lay subsidy, and records of the Company of Weavers to track the activities of Muggins and those in his networks. One particularly interesting section in the introduction analyzes available evidence to ascertain what Muggins might have read. At several moments in the book, Oldenburg discusses not only what he has found, but also what has been lost and what the archives do not reveal. Each of the book's chapters identifies one element of Muggins's life that [End Page 216] offers important context for London's Mourning Garment. While Oldenburg guides readers through these four readings of the poem, the book's structure implicitly claims that London's Mourning Garment is rich with interpretive possibilities. The first chapter argues that Muggins's brief time in prison informed the poem's class consciousness. Together with fourteen other dissatisfied silk-weavers, Muggins petitioned for greater enforcement of the company's ordinances in 1595. These men's complaints primarily targeted the influx of immigrant weavers, whom they claimed were compromising the company's integrity. The petitioners presented their document to the ministers of the French and Dutch churches, who took offense. In response, the mayor of London had Muggins and his co-petitioners arrested. I would have liked Oldenburg to analyze further the petition's "animosity toward strangers" (70)—a xenophobia he does not find in London's Mourning Garment—but I appreciate how clearly he describes the livery company's history and the divisions between its leaders and rank-and-file members. The next two chapters move to the social bonds and personal tragedy that underpin Muggins's poem. Chapter two examines social issues in Muggins's neighborhood around the time he composed London's Mourning Garment, including childbirth, mortality rates, and debt. Chapter three explores Muggins's personal experiences with grief. Three of his children and three of his apprentices died between 1598 and 1603. These histories are interspersed with close reading of the poem, which Oldenburg interprets as semi-autobiographical. The book's fourth...

This work interrogates the expressed thematic interests of Romantic drama in order to disclose the political, social and historical conflicts that energise and condition those interests. Watkins considers why drama deteriorated so badly during the Romantic period. Certain chapters are built around close readings of selected Romantic verse dramas, including Coleridge's Osario, Lamb's John Woodvil, Joanna Baille's Demonfort, Walter Scott's Halidon Hill and most of Byron's plays. Watkins locates the deterioration of the drama in the general historical transition in England from an aristocratic to a middle-class social order. Emerging in Renaissance England as the supreme expression of an aristocratic worldview, drama was ill-equipped to express the new class consciousness coming to maturation two centuries later. Watkins contends, however, that the debilitating effect of social transformation does not render drama insignificant, but rather gives it a special historical importance because it documents the various ideological struggles between a withering aristocracy and an inchoate bourgeoisie. He also charts the social-ideological spaces into which the bourgeoisie inserts itself as it begins its mastery of social reality. These struggles involve numerous social issues and relations, ranging from gender and the family to religion and economics. They also embrace and explain a variety of seemingly isolated psychological phenomena present in Romantic drama, ranging from nostalgia to anxiety.