{"product_id":"9780822380818","title":"TEST1 Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction","description":"Virtually since its inception, the United States has nurtured a dreamlike and often delirious image of itself as an essentially classless society. Given the stark levels of social inequality that have actually existed and that continue today, what sustains this at\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eonce hopelessly ideological and breathlessly utopian mirage? In \u003ci\u003eAround Quitting Time\u003c\/i\u003e Robert Seguin investigates this question, focusing on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America.\u003cbr\u003e\tTracing connections between the reconstruction of the labor process and the aesthetic dilemmas of modernism, between the emergence of the modern state and the structure of narrative, Seguin analyzes the work of Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Barth, and others. These fictional narratives serve to demonstrate for Seguin the pattern of social sites and cultural phenomenon that have emerged where work and leisure, production and consumption, and activity and passivity coincide. He reveals how, by creating pathways between these seemingly opposed domains, the middle-class imaginary at once captures and suspends the dynamics of social class and opens out onto a political and cultural terrain where class is both omnipresent and invisible. \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\tAroung Quitting Time\u003c\/i\u003e will interest critics and historians of modern U.S. culture, literary scholars, and those who explore the interaction between economic and cultural forms.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47110741721328,"sku":"9780822380818","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780822380818_p0.jpg?v=1763750959","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780822380818","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}