Introduction : Whose plot is it anyway?
1. Workers in the wings : antebellum fictions
2. I'm looking through you : working men from status quo to knights of labor fiction
3. Labor's ladies : work fiction and true women from antebellum Lowell through the Gilded Age
4. Taking to their streets : ethnic cultures and labor texts in the sociological 1890s
5. Beastmen and labor experts : fiction and the problem of authority from 1900 to 1917
6. Facing the unwomanly : sweatshop and sex shop in progressive era labor fiction
7. The hungary eye : desire and disaffection in 1920s labor fiction
8. From Black folk to working class : African American labor fiction between the World Wars
9. Heroic at last : Depression era fiction
10. What war your crime? : representing labor in the HUAC era
11. The usable past : jobs, myths, and three racial-ethnic literatures of the Civil Rights era
12. Working-class twilight : White labor texts of the Civil Rights and Vietnam decades
Conclusion : Everything old is new again : working through class in the literary 1990s