Introduction
Charles Brockden Brown, poverty, and the bildungsroman
Modern chivalry's defense of "the few": class, politics, and the early U.S. episodic novel
The providence of class: Catharine Maria Sedgwick, political economy, and sentimental fiction in the 1830s
No apologies for the anti-renters: class, James Fenimore Cooper, and frontier romance
Working-class abolitionism and anti-slavery fiction: "white slaves" and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred
Conclusion.