Reading the Classed Child

Drawing from research in multiple archives, Reading the Classed Child is the first to examine the language of children in poverty in Depression-era literature and culture by rereading their language not as tangled errors but as innovative discourse. Drawing on sociolinguistic, literary, and cultural theories, Morris Davis unpacks the ways language represented in literature, culture, and the speech of young people is a dynamic through which mainstream language negotiates with anti-language—language that defines its own parameters against discourses of power and privilege. While some representations of the poor child’s language diminish and even erase the disorder within that speech, many literary constructions of the child’s anti-language, as well as linguistic cultural productions of young people themselves, challenge long-held assumptions of the poor and the young. In this resistance, these texts open the child’s interior complexity and make visible that which has been long ignored in studies of this era. Rereading the language of the classed child in this way expands critical discussions of childhood and poverty and, most important, repositions young people in poverty as active producers of political and cultural meaning.