Around Quitting Time

“[A]n important contribution to the analysis of class in American fiction. . . . Seguin’s discussion becomes truly fascinating and compelling. . . . Around Quitting Time is both timely and important, bringing an intelligent, sophisticated, and much-needed new perspective to bear on the problem of class(lessness) and the Utopian imaginary which defines the American Dream.” - Stephen Ross , Modern Fiction Studies

“In Around Quitting Time, Robert Sequin makes a major contribution to the ‘New Americanist’ rethinking of classic American literature in dialectical relation to American cultural and social history. . . . [T]his is a complex and stimulating account of the ‘stalled dialect’ of the American imagination . . . .The topic is a particularly significant one . . . . [Around Quitting Time] is certainly of interest to any student of this period of American literature, and indeed to anyone who puzzles over questions of labor, leisure and class in American life and politics today.” - Naomi Jacobs , Utopian Studies

"[O]ffers a complex and rigorously theorized approach to the middle-class imaginary through the problematic of production. . . . [A] welcome and important intervention. . . ." - Amy Blair, American Quarterly

"[R]eaders will find Seguin's ideas useful and . . . enlightening. . . ." - Lydia A. Schultz, Dreiser Studies

"I found the book to be provocative. . . . I would recommend this book to graduate students and professors of American Studies." - Sarah Cheney Watson , Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas

"Sequin's analysis generally leads to probing and persuasive conclusions about how middle-class ambivalence is lived as a pregnant dialectical pause, a timid hesitation before the unimaginable future." - Andrew Knighton , Cultural Critique

“A remarkably positive achievement that contributes significantly to an understanding of quite a range of texts, to an understanding of specific currents of literary modernism, and most generally to an understanding of class, which—in a U.S. context especially—remains that most vexed of social categories.” - Evan Watkins, Pennsylvania State University

“Rob Seguin’s Around Quitting Time makes a major contribution to discussions of class formation in the United States. His original readings of novels by Dreiser, Cather, West, and Barth brilliantly pursue the ghostly tracks of social and cultural change as they are rendered in fine narrative and linguistic detail within the domain of the literary. His mode of reading is as significant as his argument about the "classlessness" of the middle class. Indeed, Seguin demonstrates in exemplary fashion that it is possible to attend to literature as a social and political force without neglecting the specificity of its aesthetic work.” - Janice A. Radway, Duke University