In this volume of MLA’s Options for Teachings series, the editors explain their use of “laboring class”: it captures the “plurality and diversity” of experiences and authors, such as “women and authors of African descent.” “Laboring class” is denoted by “material reality” and “world view,” yet delineations should examine “the blurring of class lines” and “changes in an author’s material circumstances,” which will “enrich our understanding” of “dominant heuristic categories, of gender, race, and empire.” Even though the editors eschew imposing a laboring-class canon, certain names reappear, such as John Clare, Stephen Duck, and Mary Leapor. Nonetheless, these categories as well as varied authors and texts, perhaps unfamiliar to some instructors, are demonstrated amply in the selection of essays.Gender, Moyra Haslett suggests, functions as a “heuristic category” in Mary Leapor’s “Crumble Hall,” “Essay on Woman,” and “Man the Monarch.” In accounts of African descent and labor such as Briton Hammon’s A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (1760), Vincent Carretta argues, authors “position themselves rhetorically as strangers in strange lands to comment on the society [in which] they found themselves.” James Simmons explores relations between laboring-class and canonical writings.Theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau are invoked as offering means to theorize everyday life. One minor quibble: the editors state that “laboring class writers do not fit tidily into overarching literary or intellectual paradigms,” which is why “none of the essays” utilizes “classical Marxism.” Yet surely “intellectual paradigms” of the sort Marx has provided for almost two centuries could stimulate students’ “reflection,” as called for by the editors, in interrogating the origins, tendencies, and models of economic inequality. A second quibble: although the volume title would suggest an equal number of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures, it tilts heavily toward the latter period. There is thus little here of interest for eighteenth-century instructors.