Sex, Class and Culture

First published in 1986, Sex, Class and Culture is a collection of Marxist feminist essays that develops an original critical theory and applies it to literature, the visual arts, and mass media. Lillian Robinson was the first American critic to suggest the essential connections among sex, class, and race as forces that shape works of art and the critical response to them. In applying her theory to particular texts, she considers topics from the Renaissance epic to the Regency romance, from Jane Austen to contemporary feminist poets, and from factory workers’ memoirs to TV images of career women and housewives. The essays are insightful because Robinson clearly knows this wide assortment of texts, cares about their significance, and writes about them with wit. They are irreverent, because she asserts the feminist critic’s permanent responsibility to ask "So What?" and they are controversial because she constantly addresses that question to our most powerful and respectable institutions – social and literary. This book will be of interest to students of literature, history, gender studies and sexuality studies.