Author Description

This volume explores how our ideas about social class originated and have developed, focusing on the purpose of using "class" terminology. Furbank discusses what Marx meant by "bourgeois," the validity of historians and sociologists' uses of the term "class," and the motives of those who take "unholy pleasure" in finding class amusing, as well covering more concrete topics such as the master-servant relationship and the popularity of etiquette books. He calls "class" a rhetorical term used as a form of social action, and concludes that it has had its day, with novelists like Dickens, Kafka, and Proust demonstrating how to see through and beyond it.