The stratification of peoples--by geography, wealth, lineage, or culture--is the subject of this group of essays. Whether considering gossip in Jane Austen's Emma or outlining the collision of race and class in California (to take two examples), each essay examines an aspect of the social fabric through written texts and the historical record.

Yota Batsaki, "Clarissa; or, Rake Versus Usurer," Winter 2006, 93: 22-48.

Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, eds., Redress, special issue, Fall 2005, number 92.

Richard H. Brodhead, "Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America," Winter 1988, 21: 67-96.

Rey Chow, "Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay)," Spring 2006, 94: 131-49.

Carol J. Clover, "Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe," Fall 1993, 44: 1-28.

Stuart Culver, "What Manikins Want: The Wonderful World of Oz and The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows," Winter 1988, 21: 97-116.

Robert Darnton, "Mademoiselle Bonafon and the Private Life of Louis XV: Communication Circuits in Eighteenth-Century France," Summer 2004, 87: 102-24.

Robert Darnton, "Policing Writers in Paris Circa 1750," Winter 1984, 5: 1-32. 

Natalie Zemon Davis, "Religion and Capitalism Once Again?  Jewish Merchant Culture in the Seventeenth Century," Summer 1997, 59: 56-84.

Colin Dayan, "Legal Terrors," Fall 2005, 92: 42-80.

Nicholas B. Dirks, "Castes of Mind," Winter 1992, 37: 56-78.

Frances Ferguson, "Reading Morals: Locke and Rousseau on Education and Inequality," Spring 1984, 6: 66-84.

Casey Finch and Peter Bowen, "'The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury': Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma," Summer 1990, 31: 1-18.

Catherine Gallagher, "George Eliot: Immanent Victorian," Spring 2005, 90: 61-74.

Stephen Greenblatt, "Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion," Winter 1983, 1: 1-30.

Stephen Gudeman, "Ricardo's Representations," Winter 1984, 5: 90-114. 

Langdon Hammer, "Plath’s Lives," Summer 2001, 75: 61-88.

Don Herzog, "The Trouble with Hairdressers," Winter 1999, 53: 21-43.

Lynn Hunt, "Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution," Spring 1983, 2: 95-117.

Audrey Jaffe, "Detecting the Beggar: Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and 'The Man with the Twisted Lip,'" Summer 1990, 31: 96-117.

David Kaiser, "The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists During the Early Cold War," Spring 2005, 90: 28-60.

Leslie Katz, "The Merry Wives of Windsor: Sharing the Queen's Holiday," Summer 1995, 51: 77-93.

Michael Kwass, "Ordering the World of Goods: Consumer Revolution and the Classification of Objects in Eighteen," Spring 2003, 82: 87-116.

Kathleen Kete, "La Rage and the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Context of Rabies in the French Nineteenth Century," Spring 1988, 22: 89-107.

Thomas Laqueur, "Bodies, Death, and Pauper Funerals," Winter 1983, 1: 109-31. 

David Lloyd, "Valéry on Value: The Political Economy of Poetics," Summer 1984, 7: 116-32.20

David Lloyd, "The Indigent Sublime: Specters of Irish Hunger," Fall 2005, 92: 152-85.