One appreciates the task that Nicholas Coles and Paul Lauter set themselves in compiling this volume when one considers the extent to which each term that constitutes the titular subject of their History – “American,” “Working-Class,” ‘Literature” – is in its own regard endlessly unstable and mutable, its individual boundaries and definitions the subjects of enduring debate and query. Inevitably, the acts of selection and inclusion that produce a work such as this ultimately ask (and result in one possible answer to) the question “what is ‘American working-class literature’?” In so doing, those acts furthermore venture implicitly into the choppy waters surrounding the definitions of the constituent parts of that title.

In this respect, whilst one might query the capacity of an edited collection such as this to offer the narrative coherence suggested by its self-definition as “a history,” it perhaps in fact offers the most effective formal approach to the challenge at hand. A linear, single-author narrative history could never fully escape the sense of claiming, even if only implicitly, to attempt, however provisionally, to compass a “whole story” of the subject – an attempt fated to be partial in both senses of the word. The essay collection is, by contrast, a form to some degree more modest in its aims and thus more likely to achieve them, precisely because it does not presume to provide more than a selection of perspectives which, taken in concert, illuminate multifariously the breadth of the topic. In the very fact that it thus provides many answers, a collected edition tacitly recognizes that what it offers in sum cannot be given as “the” answer. Nevertheless, editorial questions of inclusion and exclusion of course remain proximate, pertinent, and consequential, and Coles and Lauter field them adeptly, succeeding in the careful selection and sensitive structural organization of twenty-four pieces of scholarship that are uniform only in their excellence. In their subject matter, scope, style, methodological approach, and authorial provenance, by contrast, these essays bring to the topic a pleasingly – and indeed essentially – vast diversity.

The “America” whose working-class literature the editors have set out to chart is, by and large, the United States – “a fairly traditional conception of ‘American’,” they acknowledge (2). This is not, however, to the collection's detriment, and any narrowness it may suggest is not in fact borne out by the essays’ true geographical span. The editors claim that their “traditional conception” does not represent a rejection of the transnational turn, and the assertion is fair, manifest from Matthew Pethers's opening chapter on writings by and about servants and convicts transported from Britain to the New World to Joseph Entin's argument for “transnational migration narratives” as a “primary genre in the age of neoliberal globalization” (389). Mexico, Cuba, Barbados, Pakistan, and Germany all appear as specific (inter)national contexts from which “American” working-class literature has been constructed, as in more general terms do the vast African and Eastern European diasporas. No such itinerary could be exhaustive, but this again is in the nature of the collection as a form. Such restrictions fail to detract from the volume's persistent engagement with the inextricability of the United States’ working-class experiences and cultures from the illimitable complexity of its identity as a nation of immigrants.

Likewise, the collection reaches beyond the temporal boundaries of the United States, commencing as it does by casting back to the early years of the British colonial era, with Pethers quoting John Smith from 1616. At the opposite end of the chronological span, Sara Appel's innovative reading of the place of class in intersectional analysis draws upon the television series Orange Is the New Black. A diversity of approaches to temporal scope is visible not merely across the course of the collection as a whole but also within the individual essays. While some contributors have successfully drawn their chronological frames tightly around particular moments (Peter Riley on Whitman in the 1850s, Alicia Williamson on marriage plots in socialist fiction of the first decade and a half of the twentieth century), longer, synoptic views appear more frequently and are no less persuasive. Joe Lockard's lineage of prison literature from the War of Independence to the War on Terror constitutes the broadest arc, but time spans of a century or close thereto are not uncommon, as in essays by Jan Goggans and Kathy M. Newman. On the vexed question of what may be taken to constitute “literature,” the spread is again capacious and inclusive, taking in poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, stage, screen, song, agitation, autobiography, and circulatory paradigms from oral traditions to mass publishing.

The breadth of forms, periods, and geographies upon which these essays alight is itself indicative of (and perhaps makes inevitable) a concordantly catholic approach to arguably the most contentious of the title's unstable elements – the issue of what it is to be “working-class.” Indeed, one of the collection's abiding impressions is of the sheer multiplicity of the heterogeneously intersecting political, economic, cultural and social parameters that have created such diverse and shifting constructions of working-class identity as are represented in the literature discussed. The resulting work can thus, in its bold reach and generous spirit, be taken as an oblique companion to American Working-Class Literature (2006), the similarly ambitious and now totemic primary-text anthology edited by Coles and Janet Zandy. This volume deserves to become as essential a resource to scholars probing a field that not only remains understudied but, moreover, critically challenges, queries, and cuts across other categories (of form, of genre, of period) into which we perhaps more familiarly subdivide literature. In the variety, vitality, and originality of the scholarship displayed therein, A History of American Working-Class Literature constitutes a powerful contribution to that ever-unfinished labour.