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Journal articles on the topic 'Working-class writers'
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1
Tighe, Carl. "Marek Hłasko – working-class hero." Journal of European Studies 48, no. 2 (April 12, 2018): 144–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0047244118767817.
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In his early twenties Marek Hłasko (1934–69), an ‘angry young man’ and a rare ‘authentic’ working-class voice, became the great literary hope of the Polish Communist Party. In the space of a few months, and at a crucial moment in post-war Polish history, he made his literary debut, published two books, received the Polish State Literary Prize and instantly became a popular youth-hero and celebrity rebel. But just as rapidly he became an exile, an outcast and a pariah. In the West he found ‘freedom’ as difficult to negotiate as life under communism, and while he continued to write, after 11 nomadic years he died of an overdose. His life and his writing are of one piece: his career trajectory illustrates how the Party could operate to promote writers it favoured, but to block and isolate those who opposed it.
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HILLIARD, CHRISTOPHER. "MODERNISM AND THE COMMON WRITER." Historical Journal 48, no. 3 (September 2005): 769–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x05004656.
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This article re-examines the resistance to literary modernism in interwar Britain from the angle of popular literary theory and practice. Drawing on the papers of some of the notable working-class writers of this period, it disputes Jonathan Rose's claim that a rejection of modernist ‘obscurantism’ was a response distinctive to working-class autodidacts. Moreover, many middle-class readers responded to modernism in the same terms that Rose takes to be peculiar to a working-class intelligentsia. Negative reactions to modernism are better explained as a response conditioned by a literary discourse in which plebeian autodidacts as well as middle-class readers participated. The article approaches this discourse via the aspiring authors who joined writing clubs in the interwar period. Because these people were at once fairly typical readers and writers, their ideas and practices disclose more about popular understandings of literature than debates in the national press or literary reviews do. Their ideas about what constituted good writing and their hostility to modernism were underpinned by a popular conception of literature that derived from English romanticism.
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Conners, Carrie. "‘Ping Ping Ping / I break things’: Productive Disruption in the WorkingClass Poetry of Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman." Journal of Working-Class Studies 3, no. 1 (June 1, 2018): 6–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.13001/jwcs.v3i1.6111.
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This essay explores how working-class lives are represented in the poetry of three American women poets, Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman. It discusses how the poets’ working-class backgrounds affect their poetics and their perceptions of poetic craft. Through analysis, I show how their poetry shares a sense of defiant resistance, communicated through imagery of violence, labor, and sexual pleasure, responding to societal and institutional limitations placed on working-class women and working-class women writers.
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Frank, Dana. "White Working-Class Women and the Race Question." International Labor and Working-Class History 54 (1998): 80–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547900006220.
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In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness David Roediger tells the story of Covington Hall, the editor of a newsletter published by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1913 and 1914. Roediger deftly analyzes efforts by Hall and other white writers in the brotherhood to construct cross-racial unity within an otherwise racially torn working class. He shows how Hall redrew the lines of solidarity: On one side were the degraded, of any race.On the other were enlightened workers who eschewed racial divisions, racist language, and stereotypes. “There are white men, Negro men, and Mexican men in this union, but no niggers, greasers or white trash,” proclaimed Ed Lehman, a soapbox speaker for the Brotherhood. A headline in the newsletter similarly asked readers to choose, “SLAVES OR MEN, WHICH?” Still more graphically, a cartoon commanded, “Let all white MEN and Negro MEN get on the same side of this rotten log.”
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Michael Pierse. "“My City's Million Voices Chiding Me”: “Answerability” and Modern Irish Working-class Writers." World Literature Today 87, no. 6 (2013): 51. http://dx.doi.org/10.7588/worllitetoda.87.6.0051.
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Bold, Christine. "Worker-Writers on the WPA: The Case of New Bedford, Massachusetts." Prospects 28 (October 2004): 281–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300001514.
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When Joseph Freeman celebrated the standard 1930s' version of heroic worker-writers at the American Writers' Congress, he didn't seem to notice that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a conflicted category. His vision assumed that the WPA empowered writers by aligning them with laborers, folding them into the celebration of physical labor promoted by the New Deal, an assumption that reverberated widely both at that political moment and in more recent discussions (Figure 1). This essay argues that bringing together the categories of worker and writer under New Deal sponsorship was a much less seamless, less heroic, and less masculinist operation than is generally asserted. It reconstructs the experiences of WPA writers with a local specificity heretofore missing from the discussion: in this case, the assortment of employees – the white-collar destitute, widows, impoverished gentility – on the New Bedford District Office of the Massachusetts Writers' Project. From this perspective, the experience of WPA employment was more in tension than in solidarity with working-class practices. The dynamics of government bureaucracy most often left project employees stranded between the categories of worker and writer, attempting (with limited success) to negotiate a resolution in both their social and their narrative positions.
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Lepley, John Walter. "Stray dogs: Interviews with working-class writers, edited by Daniel M. Mendoza." Writing & Pedagogy 11, no. 3 (December 3, 2019): 433–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/wap.35310.
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Ackers, Peter. "West End Chapel, Back Street Bethel: Labour and Capital in the Wigan Churches of Christ c. 1845–1945." Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47, no. 2 (April 1996): 298–329. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022046900080027.
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There is a large and complex literature regarding the part played by working-class Nonconformity in the industrial revolution and the emergence of the English labour movement. For all its nuances, this writing can be separated into two main strands. The first, broadly Marxist, perspective sees working-class Nonconformity primarily as a form of capitalist control, inculcating bourgeois norms of hard work, thrift, respectability and political moderation into the working class. However, even labour historians who subscribe to this view cannot help but be struck by the ubiquitous accounts of lay preachers at the forefront of Victorian labour movement campaigns, especially in the coalfields. Thus, the second view stresses the part played by working-class Nonconformists in leading their class towards political and industrial emancipation. To a considerable extent, the stance taken, particularly on Methodism, depends on whether writers draw their evidence from national, usually middle-class, denominational hierarchies, or from local accounts of working-class religiosity.
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Creighton, Colin. "The ‘Family Wage’ as a Class-Rational Strategy." Sociological Review 44, no. 2 (May 1996): 204–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1996.tb00422.x.
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This paper re-examines the debate about the class rationality of the working-class demand for a family wage and argues that this issue cannot be resolved without considering the feasibility of alternative strategies. Existing accounts are criticized for their unrealistic treatment of these alternatives and the constraints upon them and particularly for their neglect of the influence of the policies of employers and the state upon working-class strategies. The argument is supported by discussion of the economic and political context of the family wage demand in Britain up to the First World War and concludes that the strategy was more rational than many writers have suggested.
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DuRose, Lisa. "How to Seduce a Working Girl: Vaudevillian Entertainment in American Working–Class Fiction 1890–1925." Prospects 24 (October 1999): 377–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300000429.
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“The city,” Theodore Dreiser explains at the beginning of Sister Carrie, “has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are larger forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the pervasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye” (1). Dreiser's description here echoes many early 20th-century writers' anxieties about the rise of the modern city — from social reformers like Jane Addams and Jacob Riis to journalists and novelists as varied as Stephen Crane and Jean Toomer. But it is Dreiser's depiction of the city as a seducer, as an irresistible wooer, which finally arrives at the heart of the controversy. In the age that saw an increase in the most socially diverse wage seekers — newly arrived immigrants, Southern blacks who migrated North, and single, young women from the country — the city promises, only in the heat of passion, economic and social possibilities, a chance to live out the full contract of American democracy. And the city finds no better stage for its wooing of these new generations of Americans than that of the vaudeville theater.
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Cheetham, Dominic. "Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars." International Research in Children's Literature 5, no. 1 (July 2012): 36–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2012.0042.
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In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.
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Gilfoyle, Timothy J. "The Hearts of Nineteenth-Century Men: Bigamy and Working-Class Marriage in New York City, 1800–1890." Prospects 19 (October 1994): 135–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300005081.
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In 19th-century america, the bigamous marriage became a controversial subject and repeated cultural metaphor. From popular fiction to sensationalistic journalism to purity reform literature, writers repeatedly employed bigamy as a moral signpost warning readers of the sexual dangers and illicit deceptions of urban life. Middle-class Americans in particular envisioned the male bigamist as a particular type of confidence man. Like gamblers and “sporting men,” these figures prowled the parlors of respectable households in search of hapless, innocent women whom they looked to conquer and seduce, dupe and destroy. Such status-conscious social climbers deceptively passed for something they were not. Most authors depicted the practice in Manichaean terms of good versus evil, innocence versus corruption. Bigamy thus enabled writers to contrast the nostalgic, virtuous, agrarian republicanism of postrevolutionary America with the perceived urban depravity of the coarse, new metropolis. Such illegal matrimony, editorialized one newspaper, “speaks volumes for man's duplicity and woman's weakness.” Pure and simple, bigamy was “mere wickedness.”
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Stanton-Salazar, Ricardo. "A Social Capital Framework for Understanding the Socialization of Racial Minority Children and Youths." Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 1 (January 1, 1997): 1–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.17763/haer.67.1.140676g74018u73k.
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In this article, Ricardo Stanton-Salzar offers a network-analytic framework for understanding the socialization and schooling experiences of working-class racial minority youth. Unlike many previous writers who have examined the role of "significant others," he examines the role that relationships between youth and institutional agents, such as teachers and counselors, play in the greater multicultural context in which working-class minority youth must negotiate. Stanton-Salazar provides the conceptual foundations of a framework built around the concepts of social capital and institutional support. He concentrates on illuminating those institutional and ideological forces that he believes make access to social capital and institutional support within schools and other institutional settings so problematic for working-class minority children and adolescents. Stanton-Salazar also provides some clues as to how some working-class minority youth are able to manage their difficult participation in multiple worlds, how they develop cultural strategies for overcoming various obstacles, and how they manage to develop sustaining and supportive relationships with institutional agents.
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Trainor, Richard. "Urban elites in Victorian Britain." Urban History 12 (May 1985): 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0963926800007458.
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After years of concentration on the working class, social historians of nineteenth-century urban Britain have recently rediscovered the upper and middle classes. Various writers have recognized these groups, and elites within them, as significant subjects in themselves and as major influences in urban society generally.
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Dumka, Bie Precious. "The African Writer and Commitment in Art: a Critical Discourse of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Literature of Commitment, Social Vision and Stylistic Use of Satire in Matigari." Scholedge International Journal of Multidisciplinary & Allied Studies ISSN 2394-336X 5, no. 1 (February 9, 2018): 11. http://dx.doi.org/10.19085/journal.sijmas050102.
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<p>African writers like Ngugi Wa Thiong’o have not relented in their portraiture of the dehumanizing plights of the working class. Ngugi is a revolutionary writer conditioned by the colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial socio-political and economic quagmire and experiences surrounding him, and as such he has no choice than to use art as an avenue of expressing his ideology and vision about the multifaceted problems as pictured in his society. This paper therefore, examines commitment in literature with particular focus on the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s committed literature and social vision, his stylistic use of satire. The conceptual framework is Marxism using Ngugi’s Matigari. The study as a close textual analysis adopts the descriptive design.</p>
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Gurney, Peter. "Working-Class Writers and the Art of Escapology in Victorian England: The Case of Thomas Frost." Journal of British Studies 45, no. 1 (January 2006): 51–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/497055.
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Hilliard, Christopher. "Producers by Hand and by Brain: Working‐Class Writers and Left‐Wing Publishers in 1930s Britain." Journal of Modern History 78, no. 1 (March 2006): 37–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/499794.
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Liarou, Eleni. "British Television's Lost New Wave Moment: Single Drama and Race." Journal of British Cinema and Television 9, no. 4 (October 2012): 612–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2012.0108.
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The article argues that the working-class realism of post-WWII British television single drama is neither as English nor as white as is often implied. The surviving audiovisual material and written sources (reviews, publicity material, biographies of television writers and directors) reveal ITV's dynamic role in offering a range of views and representations of Britain's black population and their multi-layered relationship with white working-class cultures. By examining this neglected history of postwar British drama, this article argues for more inclusive historiographies of British television and sheds light on the dynamism and diversity of British television culture.
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Luka Lei, Zhang. "The (Un)Making of a Worker Poet: The Case of Md Mukul Hossine and Migrant Worker Writings in Singapore." Journal of Working-Class Studies 6, no. 1 (June 29, 2021): 57–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.13001/jwcs.v6i1.6439.
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This article discusses the migrant worker poet Md Mukul Hossine. Showing Mukul as the representative migrant worker poet also severely restricted and complicated his process of ‘becoming’ a poet. From a Marxist standpoint, the Singaporean literati’s dismissal of Mukul reveals the predicament of being a working-class writer in today’s neoliberal market. The particular bourgeoise ‘production mode’ of working-class literature in Singapore first ‘made’, then ‘consumed’ and ultimately ‘condemned’ Mukul. First, I examine the publication process of Mukul’s poetry and its success followed by a series of problems. In the second section, I offer a close reading of Mukul’s poems understanding Mukul’s poetics and struggles as a migrant worker poet as his poetry is seldom examined in literary criticism. Finally, I argue that the representation of migrant workers writers such as Mukul is problematic due to the nature of the whole system: how they are empowered in such a context equally does harm to them. This mode again reproduces the systematic structure of power hegemony and social inequality through the field of literature.
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Mcenaney, Tom. "Forgotten Histories of the Audiobook." Journal of Musicology 36, no. 4 (2019): 437–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2019.36.4.437.
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This article investigates the different affordances of magnetic tape and print as they are entextualized in various co(n)texts by writers, ethnographers, and musicians throughout the Americas in the late 1960s. I analyze printed books made from tape recordings—Cuban anthropologist Miguel Barnet and his interview subject Esteban Montejo’s Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1966), Rodolfo Walsh’s true-crime denunciation ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (Who killed Rosendo?, 1968), and Andy Warhol’s experimental a: a novel (1968)—to ask why these writers transduced their recordings into print rather than release them as audiobooks, how or if listening to those tapes would alter the meaning of their printed entextualizations, and what musical interactions with the same media in the same contexts can tell us about the limits both of print and of symbolic musical notation. Tracing the intersection of musical and literary works, the article argues that a writerly ethics of distortion, rather than fidelity, arises from this mutual encounter with sound on tape, and ponders how dialogic audiobooks might contest older issues of power and representation for those writers, North and South, who worked in support of marginalized (Afro-Cuban, working class, and queer) subjects.
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Clayton, Owen. "de Waal, Kit, ed. (2019) Common People: an Anthology of Working Class Writers, Unbound, London, UK. Connolly, Nathan, ed. (2017) Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class, Dead Ink, St Ives, UK." Journal of Working-Class Studies 5, no. 1 (June 1, 2020): 199–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.13001/jwcs.v5i1.6271.
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Ng, Sek-Hong. "Electronics Technicians in an Industrialising Economy: Some Glimpses on the ‘New Middle Class’." Sociological Review 34, no. 3 (August 1986): 611–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1986.tb00691.x.
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The ‘New Working Class’ theory, popularised in French sociology during the 1960s and 1970s, envisages the advent of a politically inspired class movement that rekindles the vision of a new social order as the technicians rise to become its vanguard. According to writers like Mallet and Touraine, these technical ‘white-collars’ tend to take over from the traditional manual groups in posing as the ‘standard-bearers’ of class-based industrial radicalism and solidarity. This paper proposes to trace the recent vein of discussions on the class implications of occupational and technological transformation from such a neo-Marxian perspective. It also attempts to apply these arguments to interpret the characteristics of a new occupation in Hong Kong – the technicians working in the electronics and related industries, with reference to an empirical study carried out in the early 1980s.
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Sparks, Tabitha. "WORKING-CLASS SUBJECTIVITY IN MARGARET HARKNESS'SA CITY GIRL." Victorian Literature and Culture 45, no. 3 (August 25, 2017): 615–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150317000092.
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One of the obvious strengthsof Margaret Harkness's 1887 novelA City Girlis its comprehensive visual record of London's East End. Harkness depicts Whitechapel's geography and public and residential spaces with an authority derived, as we know, from her voluntary residence in the Katharine Buildings, thinly disguised in the novel as the Charlotte Buildings. The Katherine Buildings were a block of apartments for working class tenants built by the East End Dwelling Company; Harkness lived in them for a few months in 1887 and was one of a wave of middle-class women who ventured into such residences, sometimes as employees (“lady rent collectors”) and sometimes, as with Harkness and her cousin Beatrice Potter (later Webb) as writers determined to document in fictional or non-fictional form the conditions in which the poor lived. Harkness's first-hand experience and descriptive acuity has inspired some rich and productive scholarship onA City Girl, which in the form of two scholarly editions (one recent and one forthcoming) is the subject of a modest renaissance. From a literary perspective, most scholars have grappled with the novel's generic affiliation, describing it variously as a New Woman novel, a socialist novel, a sentimental novel, and an example of English naturalism. Some of these critics – principally John Goode and Rob Breton – combine a study of the novel's generic signs with historical attention to Socialism, one of Harkness's many ambivalent and abbreviated political and institutional affiliations in the 1880s and 90s; they use the literary lens of genre study to better understand the author's political consciousness in the context of late-Victorian reform politics. Pursuing another horizon of inquiry, I turn away from the novel's documentary evidence and generic and political loyalties to its elusive but revealing study of artistic representation. It is not the sociological or political milieu of Harkness's East End heroine, Nelly Ambrose, that interests me, but the link that Harkness establishes between Nelly's impoverished mind and her impoverished world, which I read principally through her unfamiliarity with narrative representation. Harkness sustains two discrete perspectives inA City Girl: Nelly experiences the world in episodic moments, and her inability to shape these moments into a purposeful or predictive sequence makes her effectively powerless to control the events that shape her life. Her distance from a narrative consciousness alerts us to the second perspective in the novel which might otherwise escape special notice: the narrative realism thatA City Girlparticipates in, that the experience of reading the novel activates, and that is self-consciously followed by Arthur Grant, Nelly's seducer. Arthur's class-based narrative advantage over Nelly enables him to write the story of their affair and control its outcome much in the way that the readers ofA City Girlhave worked to make sense of Nelly's detached and inexpressive character, and have often made their own determinations about the novel's ending. The medium of the novel's hostility to Nelly's particular kind of consciousness is a metaliterary reflection, then, of the subjugation by narrative disadvantage that we see play out in the story.
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Nilsson, Magnus. "”Strängt taget fattas oss ingenting”: Folkhemmet i Stig Sjödins och Jenny Wrangborgs arbetarlyrik." European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 50, no. 1 (April 28, 2020): 183–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ejss-2020-0011.
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AbstractThe aim of this article is to analyze the attitudes of two prominent Swedish working-class poets – Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) and Jenny Wrangborg (born 1984) – toward the social-democratic welfare state. The premise of the analysis is that this welfare state is a historical and changing phenomenon that has attracted attention from working-class writers in different ways at different times. Sjödin wrote during the emergence and the heyday of the social-democratic welfare state, whereas Wrangborg is writing poetry at a time when the labour movement is ailing and the welfare state challenged. Thus, despite the two poets having closely aligned aesthetical and ideological ideals, their attitudes toward the welfare state are distinctly different.
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Hanley, Ryan. "SLAVERY AND THE BIRTH OF WORKING-CLASS RACISM IN ENGLAND, 1814–1833The Alexander Prize Essay." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (September 29, 2016): 103–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0080440116000074.
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ABSTRACTThis paper examines racist discourse in radical print culture from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the passing of the Abolition of Slavery Act in Britain. Acknowledging the heterogeneity of working-class ideology during the period, it demonstrates that some radical writers actively sought to dehumanise enslaved and free black people as a means of promoting the interests of the white working class in England. It argues that by promoting a particular understanding of English racial superiority, radical intellectuals such as John Cartwright, William Cobbett, and Richard Carlile were able to criticise the diversion of humanitarian resources and attention away from exploited industrial workers and towards enslaved black people in the British West Indies or unconverted free Africans. Moreover, by presenting a supposedly inferior racial antitype, they sought to minimise the social boundaries that were used to disenfranchise English working men and reinforce their own, seemingly precarious, claims to parliamentary reform and meaningful political representation.
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Griffiths, Clare. "G.D.H. Cole and William Cobbett." Rural History 10, no. 1 (April 1999): 91–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0956793300001709.
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William Cobbett was, during his own lifetime, a highly controversial figure who often found it necessary to defend himself against supposed misrepresentation. His historical persona remains no less controversial. The complexities of Cobbett's career and character have supported a variety of interpretations, and many writers this century have felt the need to define ‘the real Cobbett’. Modern misrepresentations have arisen less from false stories invented to damn him than from the misleading emphases employed to praise him, with both Left and Right seeking in their different ways to appropriate what they see as his legacy. For conservatives, he has been an essentially timeless figure, standing for Old England and all that may have made such a place great. Writers on the Left have treated him rather as a figure of the past, rationalised to fit into the rise of working-class consciousness and organisation, and divested of some aspects unseemly in an early representative of ‘the cause’. Cobbett has been adopted as an important figure for the Left, but readings based on the assumptions about working-class radicalism held by the modern British Labour movement have often found it necessary to exclude aspects of his writings as inconsistent, or at least idiosyncratic.
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Marzec, Wiktor. "The Birth of the Militant Self." East Central Europe 46, no. 1 (April 4, 2019): 29–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18763308-04601003.
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The 1905 Revolution was often considered by workers writing memoirs as the most important event in their lives. This paper examines biographical reminiscences of the political participation of working-class militants in the 1905 Revolution. I scrutinize four tropes used by working-class writers to describe their life stories narrated around their political identity. These are: (1) overcoming misery and destitution, (2) autodidacticism, (3) political initiation, and (4) feeling of belonging to the community of equals. All four demonstrate that the militant self cannot be understood in separation from the life context of the mobilized workers. Participation in party politics was an important factor modifying the life course of workers in the direction resonating with their aspirations and longings. The argument is informed by analysis of over a hundred of biographical testimonies written by militants from various political parties in different political circumstances.
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Boos, Florence. "“Ne’er Were Heroines More Strong, More Brave”: Victorian Factory Women Writers and the Role of the Working-Class Poet." Women's Writing 27, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 428–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2020.1775765.
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Coriale, Danielle. "Gaskell's Naturalist." Nineteenth-Century Literature 63, no. 3 (December 1, 2008): 346–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2008.63.3.346.
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This essay situates Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novel Mary Barton (1848) within early-Victorian discourses about natural history by studying the figure of the working-class naturalist, Job Legh. Though often regarded as a peripheral character in critical treatments of the novel, Job Legh's presence in Mary Barton suggests the possibilities and limitations that natural history presented for writers struggling to represent the turbulent social and political conditions of England during the 1840s. At times, Job's naturalist activities seem to offer a utopian alternative to the ““dangerous”” Chartist politics practiced by other characters in the novel. At other times, however, Job's knowledge and use of classificatory language alienates him from the working-class community in which he is embedded, a community otherwise excluded from the ““republic of science.”” In the latter part of this essay, I argue that Gaskell, by aligning herself with the conflicted naturalist she imagined, reveals the liminality of her own position as a novelist writing about working-class characters for an audience of middle-class readers. While Gaskell shares this liminal position with her naturalist, however, she does not share his taxonomic vision; rather, she draws on a narrative mode of natural history to develop a sympathetic account of the working classes, a mode that attends to the habits, habitats, and environmental conditions that affect the behaviors and interactions of a living thing. By situating Mary Barton within the naturalist discourses that helped produce it, this essay illustrates the limited political value of Gaskell's working-class naturalist while also suggesting the deep entanglement of novels and natural histories in Victorian Britain.
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Harris, Bernard. "Social Policy by Other Means? Mutual Aid and the Origins of the Modern Welfare State in Britain During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries." Journal of Policy History 30, no. 2 (March 8, 2018): 202–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0898030618000052.
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Abstract:During the last twenty years, several writers have drawn attention to the role played by friendly societies and other mutual-aid organizations in the development of Britain’s welfare state. Proponents of mutual aid have argued that these organizations were part of the rich associational culture of working-class life; that they represented a viable alternative to state welfare; and that they were eventually undermined by it. However, this article highlights the challenges that these organizations were already facing toward the end of the nineteenth century as a result of changes in working-class culture and the rise of more commercial insurance agencies. It suggests that the rise of state welfare was not so much a cause of these difficulties as a response to them. It also examines the role that friendly societies played in the expansion of welfare services after 1914 and their attitude to calls for further expansion before 1945.
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Branch, Andrew. "All the young dudes: educational capital, masculinity and the uses of popular music." Popular Music 31, no. 1 (January 2012): 25–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143011000444.
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AbstractSince its emergence in the early 1970s, glam rock has been theoretically categorised as a moment in British popular culture in which essentialist ideas about male gendered identity were rendered problematic for a popular music audience. Drawing on a Bourdieusian theoretical framework, the article argues that while this reading of glam is valid, insufficient attention has been given to an examination of the relevance of educational capitalvis-à-visthe construction of self-identity in relation to glam. It is therefore concerned with raising questions about social class in addition to interrogating questions of gender. The article draws on the ethno-biographies of a sample of glam's original working class male fans: original interviews with musicians and writers associated with glam, as well as published biographical accounts. In doing so it contends that glam's political significance is better understood as a moment in popular culture in which an educationally aspirant section of the male working-class sought to express its difference by identifying with the self-conscious performance of a more feminised masculinity it located in glam.
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Scott, Jeremy. "Midlands cadences: Narrative voices in the work of Alan Sillitoe." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 25, no. 4 (November 2016): 312–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947016645001.
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This paper will examine excerpts from a range of Alan Sillitoe’s prose fiction, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and short stories from the collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1958), via a comparative exploration of the texts’ representations of Midlands English demotic. The narrative discourse traces a link between the experience of the Midlands English working classes represented and the demotic language they speak; the narrators have voices redolent of registers rooted in 1950s English working-class life. The texts also contain different methods of representing their protagonists’ consciousness through the demotic idiolects that they speak. Sillitoe’s is a novelistic discourse which refuses to normalise itself to accord with the conventions of classic realism, and as such prefigures the ambitions of many contemporary writers who incline their narrative voices towards the oral – asserting the right of a character’s dialect/idiolect to be the principal register of the narrative. The paper will demonstrate this thesis through the ideas of Bakhtin, and through an analytical taxonomy derived from literary stylistics. It aims to propose a model which can be used to analyse and explore any fiction which has been labelled as ‘working-class’, and asserts that such an approach leads to a more principled characterisation of working-class fiction (based on its use of language) than current literary-critical discussions based simply on cultural/social context and biography.
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Puspasari, Annisa, and Nurul Hudayani. "INCREASING AUTONOMOUS LEARNING THROUGH PEER ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUE." AICLL: ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 1, no. 1 (April 17, 2018): 104–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.30743/aicll.v1i1.16.
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Working collaboratively with peers is one of the aspects that define learner autonomy. Peer assessment is a growing solution for writers to get an improvement. It allows students to work socially since they will know strengths and weaknesses of learning. Regarding to previous related studies, peer assessment in writing encourages students to be active and take a part of their own writing progress with their peers. (Ashley Landry, 2014). Furthermore, peer assessment can contribute and trigger student’s autonomous learning. (Kulsirisawad, 2012). It is also viewed as another way of challenging students dependence on the teacher for feedback and guidance in their language learning to emphasize learner autonomy and cooperation to get students involved and learn as much from each other as they can from the teacher (Hamid Ashraf, 2015). In this research, the writer applied peer assessment in Writing I class by considering some beneficial effects over student’s writing proficiency within the autonomous learning context as the Writing I is the beginning writing course in English Department of UIN Ar-Raniry Banda Aceh. The aim of this research to investigate the process of autonomous learning situation through peer assessment in Writing I class and find out the outcome of peer assessment in Writing I class. It was conducted by using experimental research. The population of consisted of 4 classes, consist of 119 students fourth semester. The instrument of collecting data is writing test. Based on the data analysis, the writer found that the score of the experimental class students was higher than the control class students. The analysis of research result shows that peer assessment is an appropriate technique for university students to foster learner autonomy especially in EFL writing class.
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Ostrovskaya, Elena S. "“Under the Sway of Coal,” or a Story of the British Coal Miner Harold Heslop, Who Failed to Become a Soviet Writer." Slovene 6, no. 2 (2017): 482–504. http://dx.doi.org/10.31168/2305-6754.2017.6.2.20.
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The paper focuses on the rapid and short-living Soviet writing career of the British coal miner Harold Heslop. Between 1926 and 1931, three novels by Heslop were published in the USSR (in Russian translation) and the translation of a fourth was commissioned and completed, and in 1930 the author himself travelled to the USSR as one of two members of the British delegation at the Kharkov conference of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW). However, that was the end of his success: the translated novel Red Earth was not published nor were any of his later novels. The only venue for his rare shorter essays and occasional prose excerpts was the magazine International Literature. The paper discusses this curious writer’s biography from different perspectives. It analyzes at length the critical article by Anna Elistratova, published in Na literaturnom postu and International Literature, juxtaposing the two versions and the text of Heslop’s novel to contextualize the writer and his work in the Soviet literary criticism of the time. It explores archival materials—Heslop’s correspondence with different people and institutions as well as institutional papers—to discuss the case as personal as well as institutional history, representative of the situation of the 1930s. Finally the article shifts perspective to discuss the author and his work in the context of the British working-class literature of the time.
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kaufman, cathy. "The Ideal Christmas Dinner." Gastronomica 4, no. 4 (2004): 17–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2004.4.4.17.
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Christmas dinner emerged for the first time as an important and distinctive meal in mid-nineteenth century America, fueled by changing attitudes towards the Christmas holiday, changing meal patterns, and the need to unify Americans after the Civil War and to assimilate waves of immigrants. Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol provided an ideal template for meals centering on turkey and plum pudding, and that model has continued to inform many middle and working class tables. But by the end of the nineteenth century, cookery writers for the more affluent market began to disdain turkey at Christmas, and the uniform tapestry of Christmas foods began to unravel. Christmas dinner in twentieth-century America became more a statement of class than of national identity.
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Carstairs, Catherine. "Defining Whiteness: Race, Class, and Gender Perspectives in North American History." International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (October 2001): 203–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547901214525.
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African-American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Ida B. Wells have regarded “whiteness” as a problem for a long time. However, it is only fairly recently that white historians have taken seriously the importance of de-naturalizing “whiteness,” and critically examining its privileges. “Defining Whiteness: Race, Class, and Gender Perspectives in North American History,” was sponsored by the University of Toronto and York History Departments, the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the Centre for Ethnic and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto, with the cooperation of International Labor and Working-Class History and the Canadian Committee on Labour History and its journal Labour/Le Travail. Conference organizers invited several leading American scholars of “whiteness” to Toronto, where they, along with a number of Canadian scholars, presented papers on the ways that whiteness has been constructed in North America. The conference contained much to interest labor historians and those interested in class/race/gender analytical frameworks.
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Downey, Dara. "The “Irish” Female Servant in Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood." Humanities 9, no. 4 (October 27, 2020): 128. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h9040128.
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This article examines two neo-Victorian novels by American writers—Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood (2000)—which “write back” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), respectively. Both novels ostensibly critique the socio-cultural inequalities of Victorian London, particularly for women, immigrants, and the working class, and the gender and class politics and structures of the original texts. However, as this article demonstrates, the presence of invented Irish female servants as key figures in these “re-visionary” narratives also undermines some aspects of this critique. Despite acting as gothic heroines, figures who traditionally uncover patriarchal abuses, these servant characters also facilitate their employers’ lives and negotiations of the supernatural (with varying degrees of success), while also themselves becoming associated with gothic monstrosity, via their extended associations with Irish-Catholic violence and barbarity on both sides of the Atlantic. This article therefore argues that Irish servant figures in neo-Victorian texts by American writers function as complex signifiers of pastness and barbarity, but also of assimilation and progressive modernization. Indeed, the more “Irish” the servant, the better equipped she will be to help her employer navigate the world of the supernatural.
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Vandenbussche, Wim. "Historische Sociolinguïstiek in Vlaanderen." Thema's en trends in de sociolinguistiek 4 70 (January 1, 2003): 39–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ttwia.70.05van.
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Historical sociolinguistic research on the Dutch language area during the 19th century has so far mainly been concerned with the situation in Flanders. Given the crucial relevance of this period for the history and the development of Dutch, however, there is a great need for comparable research clarifying the situation in the Northern part of the Dutch language territory. This article, which is explicitly intended as a 'teaser' for such research in the Netherlands, deals with the social communicative functions of dialect, Dutch and French for Flemish upper class writers from the town of Bruges in the 19th century. It will be demonstrated that the commonly accepted views of the opposition between French ([+prestige, upper class]) and Dutch ([-prestige, working class]) do not match the facts found in original archive corpora. Using town council records, meeting minutes from a prestigious upper class circle, and election propaganda, we will show that French, Dutch and dialect were used by the town elite according to stricdy pragmatic considerations to include or exclude specific segments of the town population in various communicative contexts.
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Mckibben, David. "Who Were the German Independent Socialists? The Leipzig City Council Election of 6 December 1917." Central European History 25, no. 4 (December 1992): 425–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008938900021452.
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The emergence of the Independent Socialist party (USPD) in Germany during World War I had momentous and long-reaching consequences. Organized as a group of dissenters within the established German Social Democratic party (SPD), independent socialism grew into a movement that split Germany's working class into two, then three, warring factions. The result was a struggle for supremacy among socialist party factions to which subsequent writers have attributed the “failed” revolution of November 1918, a Weimar Constitution that alienated rather than satisfied German workers, and ultimately the inability of German Socialists to present a unified front against the ultimate threat to German democracy: Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
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Harcup, Tony. "An insurrection in words: East End voices in the 1970s." Race & Class 51, no. 2 (September 24, 2009): 3–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306396809345573.
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From 1971 to 1976, Chris Searle was at the centre of a number of events in the East End of London that, nearly four decades on, continue to resonate. This article uses a combination of reminiscence, reflection, contemporaneous and retrospective accounts, and engagement with the writings of Searle himself, to explore the meanings of the ‘Stepney Words insurrection’ and the creation of the Basement Writers. The article is informed by ideas of critical literacy, including Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, and argues that community publishing can be seen as an expression of working-class agency and active citizenship within an alternative or ‘plebeian public sphere’.
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DİNÇER, Figun. "The Road to Wigan Pier and the Jungle: The Conditions and the Troubles of the Working Class and the Writers’ Suggestion of Socialism." Uludağ Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi 1, no. 31 (August 1, 2018): 299–308. http://dx.doi.org/10.19171/uefad.450131.
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Nelson, Dana D. "Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian PolicyArchives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States." American Literature 92, no. 4 (October 6, 2020): 809–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8781031.
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Davis, Mike. "A Boom Interview." Boom 6, no. 3 (2016): 58–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/boom.2016.6.3.58.
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Chronicler of the California dark side and LA’s underbelly, proclaiming a troubling, menacing reality beneath the bright and sunny facade, Mike Davis is one of California’s most significant contemporary writers. His most controversial books led critics to label him anything from a left-wing lunatic to a prophet of gloom and peddler of “the pornography of despair.” Yet much of his personal story and evolution are intimately touched by his experience and close reading of deeply California realities: life as part of the working class, the struggle for better working conditions, and a genuine connection to the difficulties here. His most well known books, City of Quartz and The Ecology of Fear are unsparing in their assessments of those difficulties. He invited architectural educator and Director of UCLA’s cityLAB, Dana Cuff, and Dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, Jennifer Wolch, into his San Diego home to discuss his career, his writings, and his erstwhile and ongoing efforts to understand Los Angeles.
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Wixson, Douglas. "“Black Writers and White!”: Jack Conroy, Arna Bontemps, and Interracial Collaboration in the 1930s." Prospects 23 (October 1998): 401–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300006402.
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The task of cultural recovery, George Hutchinson writes, begins with “those moments when places where the intertwined discourses of race, culture, and nation were exposed to questioning, to skepticism, to transformation, however small and localized, and when possibilities for coalitions of cultural reformers were envisioned and exploited” (Harlem, 26). The historical record has been muddied by shifting political currents and fragmented by instances of deliberate neglect over time, yet scholars have recently begun to reconstruct the complicated story of interracial cooperation between the two world wars. More effort, however, should be devoted to discovering connections and parallels between the worlds of work and art — of labor and literature — as part of this story. One reward of such effort, I suggest, will be to reveal the hitherto hidden “lines of continuity and disruption” that James A. Miller sees connecting “the African-American literary production of the 1920s and its production in the 1930s” (87–88). That those lines often intersected lines traced by nonblack literary production and working-class history reinforces Hutchinson's point that it is necessary to rethink “American cultural history from a position of interracial marginality, a position that sees ‘white’ and ‘black’ American cultures as intimately, mutually constitutive” (Harlem, 3).
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Heimlich, Timothy. "Romantic Wales and the Imperial Picturesque." Modern Language Quarterly 81, no. 2 (June 1, 2020): 169–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00267929-8151559.
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Abstract This essay argues that the aesthetic category named the picturesque was first systematized in a Welsh colonial context and that picturesque looking always reflects, to some degree, its initially imperialist function. While the picturesque rapidly acceded to a preeminent place in British travel and landscape writing, its rise was contested by Welsh and working-class writers like the antiquarian poet Richard Llwyd (1752–1835). By conspicuously failing to impose picturesque features on a carefully historicized landscape, Llwyd’s poem Beaumaris Bay (1800) lays bare the picturesque’s antihistorical drive to eradicate local difference. Renewed critical attention to early attempts to establish an antipicturesque aesthetic may uncover important precursors to present-day postcolonial and transnational theory, precursors that can enrich the ongoing global turn in literary history.
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Dreyer, Frederick. "A “Religious Society under Heaven”: John Wesley and the Identity of Methodism." Journal of British Studies 25, no. 1 (January 1986): 62–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/385854.
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Methodism figures as a kind of puzzle in the history of eighteenth-century England. Even writers who are not unsympathetic to John Wesley sometimes find his thought incoherent and confused. “The truth should be faced,” writes Frank Baker, “that Wesley (like most of us) was a bundle of contradictions.” Albert Outler celebrates Wesley's merits not as a thinker but as a popularizer of other men's doctrines. His Wesley was “by talent and intent, afolk-theologian: an eclectic who had mastered the secret of plastic synthesis, simple profundity, the common touch.” One man's eclecticism, however, is another man's humbug. The very qualities that Outler admires are those that E. P. Thompson condemns inThe Making of the English Working Class. Here Methodist theology is dismissed as “opportunist, anti-intellectual, and otiose.” Wesley “appears to have dispensed with the best and selected unhesitatingly the worst elements of Puritanism.” In doctrinal terms Methodism was not a plastic synthesis but “a mule.” What offends Thompson is not so much Wesley's incoherence as the social ambivalence of the movement that he had created. In class terms Methodism was, Thompson says, “hermaphroditic.” It attracted both masters and men. It catered to hostile social interests. It served a “dual role, as the religion of both the exploiters and the exploited.” The belief that Methodism is socially incomprehensible and perhaps in some sense socially illegitimate is not original with Thompson. Early statements of this assumption can be found in Richard Niebuhr'sThe Social Sources of Denominationalismand in John and Barbara Hammond's The Town Labourer.
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McQuade, Brendan. "“The road from Mandalay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking it aren’t immediately clear”: A World-System Biography of George Orwell." Journal of World-Systems Research 21, no. 2 (August 31, 2015): 313–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2015.7.
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George Orwell is one the best known and highly regarded writers of the twentieth century. In his adjective form—Orwellian—he has become a “Sartrean ‘singular universal,’ an individual whose “singular” experiences express the “universal” character of a historical moment. Orwell is a literary representation of the unease felt in the disenchanted, alienated, anomic world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This towering cultural legacy obscures a more complex and interesting legacy. This world-system biography explains his contemporary relevance by retracing the road from Mandalay to Wigan that transformed Eric Blair, a disappointing-Etonian-turned-imperial-policeman, into George Orwell, a contradictory and complex socialist and, later, literary icon. Orwell’s contradictory class position—between both ruling class and working class and nation and empire—and resultantly tense relationship to nationalism, empire, and the Left makes his work a particularly powerful exposition of the tension between comsopolitianism and radicalism, between the abstract concerns of intellectuals and the complex demands of local political action. Viewed in full, Orwell represents the “traumatic kernel” of our age of cynicism: the historic failure and inability of the left to find a revolutionary path forward between the “timid reformism” of social democrats and “comfortable martyrdom” of anachronistic and self-satisfied radicals.
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Jersild, Austin Lee. "Ethnic Modernity and the Russian Empire: Russian Ethnographers and Caucasian Mountaineers." Nationalities Papers 24, no. 4 (December 1996): 641–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905999608408474.
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Late Imperial Russian society experienced a time of profound social and cultural change in spite of the fact that aristocratic privilege and monarchical power endured until 1917. Contemporary writers bear witness to an emerging working-class consciousness in the cities, a peasant culture increasingly in contact with the wider world of the city and beyond, and a literary culture shaped by the latest currents in the experimental modernism of the West.1 Scholars have long explored the Russian variant of interest group politics that emerged in the wake of the Great Reforms, such as technological innovation and the Russian Navy, the development of a legal consciousness, new cultural expectations about the city and the process of urbanization, the modern aspirations and ambitions of a thriving popular culture, and even an emerging modern set of assumptions about individual sexual autonomy.2
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Lawrence, Jon. "Popular Radicalism and the Socialist Revival in Britain." Journal of British Studies 31, no. 2 (April 1992): 163–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/386002.
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The twentieth century has not been kind to the “Whig interpretation of history” with its emphasis on the inexorable triumph of reason and progress. Mortally wounded on the battlefields of Flanders, the liberal certainties that underpinned it were finally laid to rest in the shadow of the Holocaust. With the Whig interpretation died the tradition of seeing nineteenth-century politics in terms of the gradual, but uninterrupted, evolution of democratic principles and institutions. In its place emerged a new orthodoxy that stressed the discontinuities of popular politics during the nineteenth century and argued for three distinct phases of political development. The first, a phase of militant, semirevolutionary politics, coincided with the “industrial revolution” and led up to the defeat of Chartism in the late 1840s. This, it was argued, was followed by a period of stabilization during the mid-Victorian decades characterized by relative prosperity and political docility among the working classes. The final phase began with the economic downturn of the late 1870s and was said to have witnessed the reemergence of working-class militancy and socialist politics and to have culminated in the formation of the class-based Labour party.This three-phase model emerged in embryonic form between the wars in the agitprop histories of Marxist writers such as Theodore Rothstein and T. A. Jackson and in the more influential works of G. D. H. Cole and the Hammonds. At the same time, many of the reductionist assumptions that underpinned it were simultaneously finding favor within Britain's emergent school of economic historians.
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Tulloch, John, Tom Burvill, and Andrew Hood. "Reinhabiting ‘The Cherry Orchard’: Class and History in Performing Chekhov." New Theatre Quarterly 13, no. 52 (November 1997): 318–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00011441.
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Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is clearly ‘about’ the end of one social order – about time changing and time static. Yet different interpretive communities – academics in journal articles and students in their classrooms, newspaper reviewers, theatre writers like Trevor Griffiths and David Mamet, and theatre directors like Adrian Noble and Richard Eyre – ‘read’ Chekhov's representation of history and class change in different ways. The authors of this study have been exploring these different reading formations in a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Chekhov: in Criticism, Performance, and Reading’. Here – grounding their work in industry ‘readings’ via production study and interviews – they focus on production and performance of The Cherry Orchard, contrasting the Richard Eyre/Trevor Griffiths production of 1977 (reproduced in 1981 for BBC TV) with Adrian Noble's production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, in 1995. In particular, they discuss the writing, directing, acting, and staging of Chekhov's ‘modernity’ in these productions, suggesting that whereas Noble referenced and yet simultaneously occluded class in his rehearsal style and staging, Griffiths and Eyre worked for a production which not only embodied the intra-class mobility of the Thatcher era in 1981, but also the ‘then’ of Chekhov's own particular engagement with modernity and environment. John Tulloch, Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, is author of Chekhov: a Structuralist Study. Tom Burvill is Associate Professor of Drama and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, where Andrew Hood is a PhD student working on reception cultures.