Class Definitions: On the Lives and Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison

Far too often, Tokarczyk (English, Goucher College) argues, those writing about either working class writing or ethnic writing fail to recognize that the works of many authors can be both, as class cuts across ethnic and racial lines. Because of the dominant picture of the American working class as white and male, the same can be said about women's writing versus working class writing. In contrast, she reads Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison explicitly as working class writers, examining the life and works of each in separate chapters after providing an overview of working-class literature by women in the United States. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The Editors: Michelle M. Tokarczyk is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Writing Program at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. Her publications include E. L. Doctorow's Skeptical Commitment (Peter Lang, 2000) and Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory, an award-winning co-edited anthology.