Introduction: Victorian Middle-Class Status and the Negative Assertion of Value

Abstract

The introduction reconstructs England’s historical language of class and its imbrication with franchise reform, positions the book methodologically with respect to both the contemporary critical interest in forms and their principal underlying sociological theories of status, and explicates the core premise of negative assertions of value. This chapter engages at length with Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, Dror Wahrman’s Imagining the Middle Class, Max Weber’s Economy and Society, and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. The transatlantic reception of Rufus Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America provides an exemplary case study of the central argument in action.