Product Description The rise of both the empire of cotton and the empire of fashion in the nineteenth century brought new opportunities for sartorial self-expression to millions of ordinary people who could now afford to dress in style and assert their physical presence. Millions of laborers toiling in cotton fields and producing cotton cloth in industrial mills faced a brutal reality of exploitation, servitude, and regimentation—yet they also had a profound desire to express their selfhood. Another transformative force of this era—the rise of literary publication and the radical extension of literacy to the working class—opened an avenue for them to do so. Cloth and clothing provide potent tropes not only for physical but also for intellectual forms of self-expression. Drawing on sources ranging from fugitive slave narratives, newspapers, manifestos, and mill workers’ magazines to fiction, poetry, and autobiographies, Clothed in Meaning examines the significant part played by mill workers and formerly enslaved people, many of whom still worked picking cotton, in this revolution of literary self-expression. They created a new literature from their palpable daily intimacy with cotton, cloth, and clothing, as well as from their encounters with grimly innovative modes of work. In the materials of their labor they discovered vivid tropes for formulating their ideas and an exotic and expert language for articulating them. The harsh conditions of their work helped foster in their writing a trenchant irony toward the demeaning reduction of human beings to “hands” whose minds were unworthy of interest. Ultimately, Clothed in Meaning provides an essential examination of the intimate connections between oppression and luxury as recorded in the many different voices of nineteenth-century labor. Review "The academic value and social currency of Cook’s research lies very much in her subsuming of personal stories and narrated retellings into a wider reading of the cotton industry and the American economy, contributing along the way a much-needed survey of the various mechanisms that have long perpetuated disenfranchisement and marginalization under the auspices of the desires of the everyday consumer." —Fashion Theory -- Kevin Alexander Su ― Fashion Theory"Cook’s analysis of these works provides an apt capstone to her impressive contribution to material culture scholarship. Essential." —CHOICE -- G. E. Bender ― CHOICEAwarded Honorable Mention for the 2020 Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize (MLA) ― Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize (MLA)"Cook provides a new way of thinking about the writings of working people who were involved in the empire of cotton, drawing a line from Mississippi cotton fields to the New England textile mills, to the modiste studios of New York and Washington, D.C." —American Literary History -- Sarah E. Chinn ― American Literary History Review Featured in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education as a "Recent Book of Interest for African American Scholars" -- Sylvia Jenkins Cook ― The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education Published On: 2020-08-20 About the Author Sylvia Jenkins Cook is Emeritus Professor of English, University of Missouri-St.Louis.

Clothed in Meaning: Literature, Labor, and Cotton in Nineteenth-Century America (Class : Culture)

Literature & Fiction

Cook, Sylvia Jenkins

History & Criticism

University of Michigan Press

Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty: The Flesh and the Spirit (Southern Literary Studies)

Louisiana State Univ Pr

In the early nineteenth century, the southern poor white had a reputation for comic vulgarity and absurd violence; postbellum writers saw him as a quaint peasant; the 1920s transformed him into a revolutionary proletarian. Of the literary treatments discussed, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath emerges as a skillful compromise of documentary accuracy and political daring by reviving the tradition of degeneracy.Originally published in 1976.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The southern poor white in fiction

The University of North Caroli

In the early nineteenth century, the southern poor white had a reputation for comic vulgarity and absurd violence; postbellum writers saw him as a quaint peasant; the 1920s transformed him into a revolutionary proletarian. Of the literary treatments discussed, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath emerges as a skillful compromise of documentary accuracy and political daring by reviving the tradition of degeneracy. Originally published in 1976. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (Enduring Editions)

The University of North Carolina Press

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