Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature, part of the Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature series, consists of twelve essays organized into four parts; examines literature from the 1850s to the present; includes a variety of critical approaches; and considers fiction, poetry, and drama. Editor Michelle M. Tokarczyk's stated aims in the introduction are to represent a variety of contemporary approaches to the study of American working-class literature of use to teachers, students, and scholars; and to make such work available as a “hard copy resource.”

In Part I, “The Realities of Working-Class Life,” Paula Rabinowitz “examines literary and photographic landscapes of economic depression” (15), Renny Christopher compares the representation of work-related accidents and war casualties, and Sylvia J. Cook contemplates the question of slavery (i.e. slaves as working class, chattel slavery versus wage slavery) and how class intersects with race. Part II, “Pedagogy and Promises,” starts with Karen Kovacik's consideration of five contemporary women writers who are “refusing to assimilate quietly into the middle class” (72). David McCracken then reads Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel some would not deem working-class, arguing that the issues faced by the central characters are relevant. Last, Nicholas Coles examines the challenges of teaching working-class literature to middle-class students, and to students looking for distance from their working-class background. In Part III, “The Experience of Poverty,” Tokarczyk considers the relationship between more comfortable members of the working class and those living on the edge, and Michele Fazio provides a convincing argument for the inclusion of Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer in working-class studies. Phoebe S. Jackson demonstrates how Carole Chute's The Beans of Egypt Maine forces the reader to “rethink terms such as working class and class in general” (160) by considering how the everyday practice of looking and analysis of the body determine identity formation. Part IV, “Reconsidering Class, Gender, and Nation,” opens with Mathew Brophy's discussion of “the way class, gender, and empire inflect the generic conventions that structure the body of London's text [The Sea Wolf], and also the bodies represented by that text” (178). Maria F. Brandt then analyzes stage representations of women confronting poverty in the 1930s by looking at social protest theatre in general and Waiting for Lefty in more detail. Finally, Tim Libretti addresses the importance of nation and working-class identity in novels by Henry Roth.

The introduction describes working-class studies as emerging through reevaluation of the American literary canon in the 1970s, and then developing along Marxist and feminist lines through the 1990s. Perhaps as a result of the increased attention to language, texts, and signification during this period, an emphasis on close reading and cultural studies is apparent across the collection (including Part II, “Pedagogy and Promises”). Reading critically to analyze the intersection of categories such as race and gender with class works especially well in several instances. Fazio's chapter, for instance, weaves the situatedness of self in relation to systematic and structural frames of reference; explores greed and profit, class conflict, labor and race relations; and integrates history and myth, thus challenging readers to identify and come to terms with the complexity of working-class and other related issues.

The many texts and varied approaches involved in the practice of such “intersectional analysis” (3) make the identification, definition, analysis, and use of working-class literature points of contention among contemporary critics, in part because “working definitions must shift as literature does” (8). As a consequence, many chapters sit uneasily within their appointed category. Tokarczyk writes that this “slipperyness is inevitable with an anthology of articles” (10). Such “slipperyness” can be productive, leaving room for articles to “‘talk’ to one another” (10), and most editors of collected works must accept unstable boundaries and encourage dialogue between seemingly incongruous parts to some degree. In this case, although intended as a “hard copy resource,” the slippage asks much of the reader, whether versed in American working-class literature or not. Regardless, the scope and variety of the approaches employed suggests a dynamic field with openings for further inquiry.

For example, the emphasis on cultural intersections in literary or upmarket texts is noteworthy and useful – considering the forms that working-class people did and do read; trying to understand the circuits of communication that made and make such production and reception possible; and integrating the historical context within which such production, dissemination, and reception happened and happens would be a valuable way to further “a bridge between working-class and academic sensibilities” (5) by regrounding working-class studies in historical realities and material practices. The underlying methodology is productive, yet leaves work to be done on the material, transnational, and popular histories of working-class literature, arts, and criticism in America (as elsewhere). Even so, the challenges associated with the making and reading of such an ambitious collection should not detract from the valuable lines of inquiry explored, which in turn, individually and collectively, provide a basis, and point to the need, for further study in this burgeoning field.