"The Parvenu's Plot is a canny, deeply researched, and utterly engaging book. It shows how the failed social climber is the crucial ingredient in an alchemy that turns class realities into subjectivities and converts the rules of the economy into the matter of the psyche. [This] is an indispensable study for scholars of social realism."—NANCY BENTLEY, professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
"One of the distinguishing features of The Parvenu's Plot is Foote's exploration of how topics of interest to literary critics—print culture, realism—are in fact central to understanding the social codes that implicitly govern social relations. Foote is an elegant writer with a prose style that is at once witty and incisive. Engaging—both for its analysis and for its style—and persuasive, this is a book grounded in both considerable research and theoretical sophistication."—PRISCILLA WALD, professor of English and women's studies, Duke University
IN THIS VERY READABLE VOLUME, Stephanie Foote gathers a range of print sources—from novels by Edith Wharton and Henry James to gossip columns, fashion magazines, popular novels, and etiquette manuals—to ask how the realist period understood the individual experience of class. Examining the female arriviste (the parvenu of the title) in turn-of-the-century New York (where a supposedly stable elite was threatened by the nouveaux riches), Foote shows how class became more than just an economic position: it was a fundamental part of individual identity, exemplified by a shifting set of social behaviors that form the core of many nineteenth-century novels. She persuasively presents the female parvenu in turn-of-the-century culture as a key figure that embodies the volatility of social standing and the continuing project of structuring and justifying it.
STEPHANIE FOOTE is associate professor of English and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign.