Gary Day is a principal lecturer in English at De Montfort University, Bedford. He is the author of Re-reading Leavis: ‘Culture’ and Literary Criticism and has edited a number of books on literature and culture.

'a signal achievement.' - Terry Eagleton, Times Higher Educational Supplement

• Introduction; A brief history of ‘class’; Marx and class; Class and status; Class and exchange; Exchange and ‘literature’ 1 Medieval; The estates model of society; Class and the peasants; The ‘individual’; ‘Sir Gareth of Orkney’ and social mobility; Piers the Ploughman; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: identity and exchange 2 The Renaissance; Criticism and cultural production: warring significations; The intelligentsia and class; Renaissance England; The nobility and the gentry; The bourgeoisie; Masterless men; Class or status? Money, exchange and self 3 The Civil War and after; The English Revolution: a class war? Class society versus status society; The body and the bourgeoisie; Classification and capitalist economics; The plain style and the bourgeoisie; Money, self and class; Paradise Lost (1667): bedding down the bourgeois economy 4 The eighteenth century; Patricians, plebs and the persistence of hierarchy; The meanings of ‘class’ and the rise of the middle class; The free market and representation; Reason, the plain style and class; The ‘individual’, the ‘subject’ and money; The novel and class; 5 The nineteenth century; Class and hierarchy; Components of the English working class; The economic relations of class and class consciousness; Chartism; The ‘human’ and class: North and South; The individual and class; Poverty and class in the late nineteenth century; New unionism and socialism; Culture and class 6 The twentieth century; he economy of modernism; The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists; The inter-war years: who speaks for the workers? Love on the Dole; Post-war: affluence and class; The classless society? Class and post-structuralism