Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature

"Timothy Helwig has written a book that challenges historical orthodoxy about social conditions oriented around race and class in the pre-Civil War decades in the United States . . . Helwig’s book offers an invaluable new contribution to the history of this complex era."—Nineteenth-Century Literature

"Timothy Helwig’s Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature is a welcome, nuanced, and persuasive contribution to how we understand worker solidarity, both as literary representation and, by implication, as antiracist political praxis. Helwig argues that the metanarrative of strictly segregated, racialized working classes."—American Literary History

"Offering us a much needed and more complete picture of antebellum politics and culture, Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature suggests that we cannot successfully challenge racial capitalism in the twenty-first century if we do not adequately grasp how antecedent efforts did so robustly in the nineteenth century."—American Periodicals 

"Helwig makes the case for the significance of a number of forgotten, ignored sensational novels, delivering an entirely fresh reading of the racial politics of antebellum sensationalism. Moreover, Helwig's new book enriches our understanding of black-authored abolitionist writing: it makes visible another way in which this writing was enmeshed in the literary culture of its moment."—Joe Shapiro, author of The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel

"Well researched and written in clear prose, this book will reward any reader interested inthe ways in which race and class have intersected in US culture."—CHOICE