Forcefully, often elegantly written, "Class Fictions" is an important addition both to the literature on specific working-class writers and to the more general accounts of how cultural studies has framed the representation of class, and class and gender, in the first half of the twentieth century. This book encourages rather than closes down a debate about the deep ambivalence of class both as a lived and represented meaning. There is nothing quite like it in the field."--Cora Kaplan, Rutgers University