The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature

This companion provides an overview of the history, theory, and analysis of working-class literature. Taking a global and intersectional approach, it demonstrates that literature is central to the (re)interpretation of the working class, a process that involves rereading the past as well as mapping the present.

The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature provides an overview of the history, theory, and analysis of working-class literature. Taking a global and intersectional approach, the Companion demonstrates that literature is central to the (re)interpretation of the working class, a process that involves rereading the past as well as mapping the present.

The collection examines how working-class literature is defined and the functions the term serves. It maps current debates and traces the ways in which a wide variety of theoretical and political movements have shaped the field. Challenging the stereotypical view that working-class writing is concerned solely with white, male industrial labourers in the Global North, the volume features chapters on subjects from early modern writing about the poor in England to contemporary poetry by Asian migrant workers. Exploring the theoretical problems of writing about class as well as providing detailed readings of specific texts, it demonstrates the richness and diversity of this rapidly developing field and looks to the future of working-class literature.

The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature is an accessible, wide-ranging resource. It emphasizes difference and debate, bringing distinct texts, traditions, and critical perspectives into dialogue and is essential for any student or researcher looking at concepts of class within literary studies.

Autorentext

Ben Clarke is Associate Professor of Post-1900 British Literature at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. His publications include Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values (2007), Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope (with Michael Bailey and John K. Walton, 2012), and Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice (co-edited with Nick Hubble, 2018).

Inhalt

Introduction: What is Working-Class Literature?

Chapter 1. Working-class literature(s)

Chapter 2. Revolutionary Tendencies: Theories of Working-Class Writing

Chapter 3. Writing a Class to Come: Social Fiction, Heterogeneity, and the Political

Chapter 4. Seeing Anew: Making Working-Class Literature Visible Through a Working-Class Intersectional Gaze

Chapter 5. Struggle as Class Motif: 'Difficulty' in Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain

Chapter 6. Literature and the Labouring Poor in Early Modern England

Chapter 7. The Rhyme of the Ancient Labourer: working-class poets and the classics

Chapter 8. The Invisibility of Working-Class Self-Representation in Literary Classrooms, with a Focus on the Romantic-Period

Chapter 9. Working-Class Writing in Victorian Britain, 1837-1901

Working-Class British Women Writers, 1840-1914: Resistance and Community

Chapter 11. One Hundred Years of Defining (German) Working-Class Literature

Part III. Working-Class Literature in the Age of Extremes

Chapter 12. D. H. Lawrence, Class and Culture

Chapter 13. Work, Sex, and Women in D.H. Lawrence's Fiction: Intersections of Class and Gender

Clamouring for Revolutionary Literature': Working-Class Writing in the Caribbean

Chapter 15. Coalitional Politics for Exiles and Nationalists: H. T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands

Chapter 16. Broken Hands: Class and Disability in 20th-Century American Poetry

Part IV. Neoliberalism and the Future of Working-Class Literature

Chapter 17. Dramatic Representations of 'Them' and 'Us' Class Struggle in Neoliberal Britain

Chapter 18. Music and hope in Irish working-class recession writing: Roddy Doyle's The Commitments and Emmet Kirwan's Dublin Oldschool

Chapter 19. Representations of Class and Race in East African Asian Literatures

Chapter 20. Beyond Human Futures in Indra Sinha's Animal's People

Chapter 21. The Labor of Migrant Subjectivity

Chapter 22. Migrant Workers in Asia Today: A Brief Introduction.

Chapter 23. Working-Class Representation in Cinema and Literature in the Digital Age

Chapter 24. Common People: Breaking the Glass Ceiling in UK Publishing

Chapter 25. An Alternative History of Working-Class Theatre

Chapter 26. Keeping Class Visible in Recession-Era Irish Poetry

Chapter 27. Proletarian Futures: Some Representations of the Working Class in Science Fiction"

Index