In contemporary literary and cultural studies, little attention has been paid to the lower middle class, described by one scholar as “the social class with the lowest reputation in the entire history of class theory.” This article discusses the representation of the lower middle class in literature and scholarly writing. George Orwell's novels of the 1930s and Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia offer some illuminating perspectives on the British lower middle class, though Orwell's novels also reveal a conspicuous disdain for their subject. This disdain is echoed in much of the scholarly writing on the lower middle class. Decried for its reactionary attitudes by Marxists, the “petite bourgeoisie” also poses problems for a contemporary cultural politics based on the idealization of transgression and on the romance of marginality. Rather than embody an outmoded or anachronistic class formation, however, the lower middle class may offer an important key to the contemporary meaning of class.

While James Macpherson's epic translation Fingal has usually been marshaled as evidence or impugned for its lack thereof, it actually bears a reflexive and critical relation to the issue of evidence in eighteenth-century British culture. On the one hand, the text elicits the ubiquitous logic of probability that was coming to shape the epistemology of legal evidence as well as parallel formations in commercial society and even in theories of the novel; on the other hand, however, the text counteracts this logic by highlighting its own affiliation with the improbability of witness testimony. Such testimony—improbable because widely differentiated from the deliberations of jurors, for example—increasingly came to reflect the relation of literature to the legal, scientific, and philosophical discourses of knowledge. Fingal shows how the improbability of the Scottish Highlands began symbolically to enable configurations of literary form as a vehicle of social critique.

Recent readings of Rebecca Harding Davis's landmark exploration of the emerging industrial working class have been concerned primarily with the connections between class formation and gender relations. By focusing attention instead on the text's indebtedness to various contemporaneous discourses of racial subjection (which crucially shape and delimit analyses of class and representations of labor during the late antebellum era), I argue that the transcendence, mobility, and salvation that the text allows its working-class characters are subtly but consistently aligned with an emerging racial conception of whiteness. Not only does this alignment link freedom with whiteness and exploitation with blackness, but through these disabling linkages it also establishes a literary precedent for representing (and Actively resolving) class struggles with racial language.

Historians identify two principal strains of anti-Semitism in France: a traditional, religious variety rooted in medieval Catholic theology and a modern, racial variety that holds Jews responsible for the myriad of socioeconomic problems associated with the rise of mass-market capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century. This essay argues that Baudelaire exemplifies the historical transition between the two strains. The first, expressed in the poet's work in the late 1850s through the motifs of prostitution and hyper-Catholic self-martyrdom, resulted from his lifelong financial misery, his relationship with a Jewish prostitute, and his identification with Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph de Maistre. Over the course of the 1860s, largely in response to his dealings with the Jewish publisher Michel Lévy and to increasingly heavy financial and psychological pressure, Baudelaire's theological anti-Semitism turned into an aggressive, pernicious racism that culminated in his calling for “the extermination of the Jewish race.”

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of Victorian realism. With In the Cage James proves to be more alert than such predecessors not only to the social and technological mechanics of telegraphy but also to the significance of mediation—in telegraphy as well as in realist fiction. Analyzing the conjunction this essay calls “telegraphic realism” indicates the ways in which a medium's imaginative possibilities may change over time and suggests the connections between the histories of media and of literature.

This guide describes the kinds of meetings at the MLA convention and the procedures for organizing them. All correspondence concerning these procedures should be sent to the MLA convention office. The e-mail address for the convention office is convention@mla.org.

Division meetings. The MLA divisions encompass the primary scholarly and professional concerns of the association. Divisions may organize one to three meetings for the convention.

Discussion group meetings. Smaller and more specialized than the divisions, the discussion groups each arrange one meeting for the convention.

I recall two things about my exchange with the friendly soul who rang me several years ago with the offer to stand for the second vice presidency of the MLA. First is the vivid recollection of my serious and mostly incapacitating illness at the time: as it turned out this was to disable me almost completely for the first year's Executive Council meetings. The second is my somewhat ungracious response to the (mostly undeserved) compliment contained in the suggestion that I should accept the nomination: “Do I have to do anything if I get elected?” I asked with almost ridiculous impertinence. I think the answer was no, and I think I should say in my own defense that I formulated my question very specifically to mean only “do I have to do anything very much as second vice president?,” a position I had frivolously assumed was not usually thought of as bearing a great responsibility. In any case, I was elected, and I did nothing the first year except, as I said, miss most of the meetings because of illness, unending treatment, and pain. Never having had much to do with administration during the many, too many, decades of my teaching life, I have to report to you that in my year as first vice president I had the opportunity at the outset to see how a major professional organization is run by really competent people and, second, to witness its humane and rational responses to the various demands of our time and those of our by now somewhat anxious guild, especially its younger members, for whom the job crisis has been so disabling and discouraging a symptom of this fin de siècle. Because of this genuine learning experience throughout my presidency, I am really grateful to, and happy to mention in particular, the extraordinary talents of our superb executive director, Phyllis Franklin, whose sensitive intelligence and marvelous skills not only guided us as a very large professional organization through a series of new challenges but, to speak personally, rescued your faltering president on numerous occasions when his temper and peculiar sense of humor got the better of him. May I also mention Phyllis Franklin's senior colleagues in the association, to whom I and all the other elected officers and members owe so much: Martha Evans, director of MLA book publications; Terence Ford, director of Bibliographic Information Services and editor of the MLA International Bibliography; Judy Goulding, managing editor of MLA publications; Amilde Hadden, director of financial operations; Maribeth Kraus, director of convention programs; David Laurence, director of English programs and ADE; Regina Vorbeck, associate executive director and head of the Division of MLA Operations; Elizabeth Welles, director of foreign language programs and ADFL; and Carol Zuses, coordinator of governance and assistant to the executive director?

Middlemarch has been criticized as a work that subordinates politics and history to an ethics of universal sympathy. Such criticisms grant too much authority to narratorial commentary over what is represented in the novel: the grip on the bourgeoisie of an ideology derived from the aristocracy as model class of Victorian society, resulting in a baffling of the movement of democracy. The disastrous consequences of the mystification of the sources of wealth by the allure of “aristocratization” are depicted in the figure of Lydgate; the possibilities of liberation from class ideology in the interests of democracy are evident in that of Ladislaw, who emerges as, in Raymond Williams's words, the novel's “thread to the future.” The contrast between these two figures shows the novel as a whole to be a critical analysis, not a symptom, of the historical impasse of Victorian society.

Having made this announcement, nineteenth-century works of fiction would go on and on. magazines and newspapers gave them all the space they wished: the serialized novel was in its heyday. While the early chapters appeared in quick succession, the core of the work was being written out by hand, and its conclusion was yet to be conceived. Nor was it only trivial horror stories or tearjerkers that thus held the reader in thrall. Many of Dickens's novels came out in serial form, in installments. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was a serialized novel. Balzac's time, a tireless provider of mass-produced serializations, gave the still-anonymous writer lessons in the technique of suspense, of building to a climax at the end of a column. And nearly all Fontane's novels appeared first in newspapers and magazines as serializations. Witness the publisher of the Vossisiche Zeitung, where Trials and Tribulations first saw print, who exclaimed in a rage, “Will this sluttish story never end!”

Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth documents a twenty-nine-year-old debutante's disinheritance—from money, family, power, love, and social position. On a more profound level, however, the novel pursues the opposite end. Although Lily Bart is plainly vulnerable to the whims of what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called the “sexuo-economic relation,” she is nonetheless dramatically resistant to the attritional ravages of racial disintegration. This paper argues that race in The House of Mirth is an essentialist—if deeply problematic—answer to the cultural slippages of class and gender. By locating the novel within the diverse range of cultural phenomena that contributed to its racialized logic, this essay connects Wharton's fears of class mobility, mass production, immigration, and “race suicide” to the taxidermic aesthetic of racialized stasis. Part of a rare and endangered species, Lily becomes Wharton's decadent specimen of racial permanence.