Conclusion

Abstract

Given how the moderate factions of the American ruling elite largely govern as if the lower classes do not exist, I address the issue of how or in what sense academic literary studies of class and power can contribute to larger discussions of public policy, focusing on two problems: the cultural problem of the isolation of our ruling elites from the way most people live and the political problem of how the poor and working class have very little access to their representatives and little agency in electoral politics and the formation of policy. I summarize a number of proposals that current scholars and readers of criticism of class in political fiction might rally around, illustrating how a study of late-twentieth-century fiction might contribute to policy debates at the time I am writing in the second decade of the twenty-first century.