Explores the literary expression of the crisis of social class in the U.S. throughout the second half of the nineteenth century

"This is a tightly focused, original, and elegantly argued study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century U.S. fiction. It reveals for the first time a congeries of class-based relationships that have been, so to speak, hiding in plain sight. To read "The Syntax of Class" is to understand the great extent to which U.S. nineteenth-century fiction produced the hegemonic middle class within a context of debates over inequality."--Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University
"Lang reveals how the ever-shifting problems of class identity in the United States can provide sophisticated structures for literary analysis. The result is an extremely well-written, solid, and sensitive work of literary and cultural history."--Gavin Jones, Stanford University