Working-Class Literature

Eighteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of a new poetic genre, the “work” poem which took various forms of labor as its subject and was often written by laborers themselves. Several of these working class poets found their lives transformed due to the success of their verse (Stephen Duck most famously), but most faded into literary obscurity. However, a substantial body of “work” poems was produced by a diverse group of poets throughout the century, each manifesting divergent concerns and attitudes about the experience of work. This chapter assesses the formal connections uniting this poetic genre, particularly the frequent use of such literary devices as ironic distancing, litotes, and mock-georgic description. Instead of solely classifying “work” poems on the basis of their subject matter, this chapter demonstrates that such poetry (indeed the genre itself) lends itself to sophisticated literary techniques often associated with other poetic genres. In this fashion the full measure of eighteenth-century working class poetry can be evaluated more fairly, particularly by analyzing the formation of a new genre designed expressly by the poets themselves. The chapter ultimately seeks to demonstrate the connectedness, rather than the alienation, of working class poetry to the eighteenth-century British poetic tradition.

Overview and discussion of changes of class-perspective in the working-class literature of the 1900s from solidarity and collective values to individualism and a more personal and even egocentric outlook. The collective novel and short fiction of the early 1900s was replaced by the self-biografical novel in the 1930s and 1940s. The experimental and political 1960s left fiction behind and developed the working-class novel into various documentary kinds. In the late 1900s and early 2000s, however, the self-biographical novel was back, developing into personal life-writing of various kinds. These changes are simultaneous with social and political changes from classical industrialism and the welfare state into neoliberalism and new public management structures.

Grounded in feminist notions of valuing lived experiences and constructing knowledge about the wider world from material realities, this article uses autobiographical narratives and poststructural and critical theories to argue for change in children's literature. The author presents two simultaneous streams of shifting, representations and reinventions, to explore possibilities of including more varied and contradictory ways of living class-specific lives and assertively positioning readers to question the invisibility of working-class and poor lives in mainstream children's literature. A metaphor of malleable "grass houses" is used to imagine broadened and more flexible ways of thinking and talking about social class through children's picture books.

This dissertation looks at maternal representations in post-war, regional British fiction with particular focus on how the mother is portrayed in relation to male protagonists navigating a path towards masculine identity. In a period of rapid social, economic and cultural change, past indicators of masculinity were being challenged by new models of social subjectivity. Added to this, gender roles were beginning to shift and patriarchal dominance was becoming less assured. A wave of novels in the late 1950s and early 1960s, set in the Midlands or North of England gave a voice to a new generation of writers of social realism in which the male protagonist engaged in a search for self. What is remarkable is the extent to which the mother is present in this fiction and by narrowing my focus to three novels, I will examine the significance of this matriarchal presence in the following male-authored writings: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe, published in 1958, A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow, published in 1960 and Room at the Top by John Braine, published in 1957.
My first section will consider polarized depictions of the mother in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning where I will argue that she is either eulogized as a traditional working-class mother or pathologized as a sexually active mother. Representations of the latter, I will argue, aim to validate the protagonist's aggressive masculinity. In my next chapter, I will look at how motherhood represents confinement and restriction and consider how breaking free from the mother was particularly difficult for the young man in the post-war period. Focussing on A Kind of Loving, I will draw on psychoanalytical theory, looking at the role of abjection as a necessary part in the assertion of identity. Finally, I will examine the cult of domesticity as portrayed in Room at the Top, showing how this was an ideological tool created to wield patriarchal dominance as a reaction against the rise of matriarchal power. I will also consider how consumerism affected the protagonist's relationship with motherhood. In conclusion, my paper will argue that the mother is perceived to be central to issues of masculine identity in the post-war period and that in order to assert his masculinity, the protagonist must challenge, deny, conquer or destroy motherhood.

L'ouvrier héroïque ou alcoolique ? l'ouvrière impie ou révoltée ? La classe « fidèle à la France profanée », comme le disait Mauriac ? Ces assertions résument des représentations sommaires du monde ouvrier, des clichés qui ont abondamment circulé dans des textes et des images. Il s'agit d'en analyser les grandes évolutions depuis les stigmatisations du premier XIX e siècle jusqu'à aujourd'hui, en circulant à travers différentes figures ouvrières

Correspondence between W. B. Yeats and the ‘pitman-poet’ Joseph Skipsey  demonstrates new insights into the early careers of Yeats and a deeper understanding of the possibilities and capabilities of the Victorian working classes. This article argues that, in Skipsey, Yeats found an English equivalent to the Irish peasant poet whose life and poetry was central to his vision of Ireland and an integral part of the nation’s literary revival; a noble savage whose life and oral tradition was unsullied by rampant Victorian industrial capitalism.

ÖZET Orhan Kemal Türk edebiyatında işçi sınıfının edebiyatta bir gündem haline gelmesi ve bir karşılık bulmasında önemli bir edebiyatçıdır. Türkiye'de kentleşmenin ve sanayileşmenin emeklemeye başladığı yıllarda, köylülükten işçileşme sürecine geçen toplumsal gruplarla ilgili yaptığı gözlemler ve bu gözlemler üzerinden yaptığı kurgu Türkiye'de işçi sınıfının oluşum sorunlarına dair önermelerine yaslanmaktadır. Bu çalışmada da Orhan Kemal'in bu gözlemleri ve önemeleri sosyolojik bir analize tabi tutulmaktadır. Ayrıca Orhan Kemal'in kendisinin de bizzat işçilikten gelme bir entelektüel olmasının Orhan Kemal'in Türkiye'de eşi benzeri zor bulunacak 'işçi sınıfının organik aydın' olup olmadığı tartışmasını da bu çalışma çerçevesinde beraberinde getirmiştir. Türk modernleşmesinin 'emek' boyutuyla bir analizi bakımından Orhan Kemal edebiyatı çeşitli yönleriyle ele alınmıştır. ANAHTAR KELİMELER Orhan Kemal, işçi sınıfı, edebiyat, roman, organik aydın, işçileşme, işçi sınıfı edebiyatı, emek JEL KODLARI JEL Z13
ABSTRACT Orhan Kemal is a prominent writer who actively contributed emergence of the working class as a popular topic in Turkish literature of novels and stories. His observations on the process of the shift of people from peasantry to the workers and his literary fiction built upon these observations took place mainly on the issues of the formation of working class in Turkey in the years of the birth of industrialization and 1 Arş.Gör.Dr, Gazi Üniversitesi Sosyoloji Bölümü

Faculty members take pride in the great diversity of students attending LaGuardia Community College.  Our students self-identify with various nationalities, races, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations.  Not only do students adopt diverse identity markers, but they also come to our classroom with variant skill levels.  It is difficult to generalize about the students given the great diversity we encounter in our classrooms.  Still, when designing a course, I must make general assumptions about the best texts to teach and the best methods for teaching these.  A choice of a given text not only implies that it has something of value to teach the students, it also assumes that at least a majority of them will engage that text in order to learn as much as possible from it.  In other words, when instructors choose a text we make assumptions about our students as well as the text.  In this essay, I wish to discuss why and how I encourage Writing through Literature (ENG 102) students at LaGuardia Community College to reflect on issues of class and work through an analysis of the texts of Charles Bukowski.

Nueva edición de Amor y anarquía: escritos de Luisa Capetillo (1992, 2021).  La selección de escritos de la militante anarco-feminista puertorriqueña, introducida por un estudio y un nuevo prólogo de Ramos, incluye ahora una sección de trabajos críticos y testimonios de Norma Valle Ferrer, Teresa Peña Jordán, Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, Sonia Fritz, Féliz Matos Rodríguez, Carmen Centeno Añeses, Carmen Romeu Toro, Nancy Bird-Soto, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Lissette Rolón Collazo y Raquel Salas Rivera.

In the influential 1930 proletarian novel by Mike Gold, Jews without Money, a young narrator travels with his parents to the then suburbs of Brooklyn with a “Zionist leader” to consider the real estate speculator’s offer to buy into racially segregated housing tracts. Observing the isolation of the neighborhood and the ostentatious whiteness of the Zionist developer, Gold forces implicit connections among whiteness, Zionism, and speculation in land. Reinforced by the narrator’s positive identification with a working-class Jew who proudly identifies as racially marked, the young Mikey contrasts working-class antiracism with the class pretentions and racism of Zionism. This essay explores the Jewish world in which Gold’s novel was written, looking at the ways in which Jewish writers and journalists in the Communist Party and other left-wing organizations articulated an anti-Zionist politics as part of a global critique of capitalism and imperialism. This essay argues that left-wing anti-Zionism articulated an ontologically different concept of Jewish being-in-the-world up to and after the Holocaust, one that centered solidarity and diasporic anti-imperialism in the face of fascist violence. Linking anti-Zionism with a Jewish left critique of whiteness, this essay provides a counternarrative to the assumption that assimilation, bourgeois liberalism, and support for Zionism were teleological certainties for the Jewish Left, or that nationalism was the default response to the European Judeocide.

This is a detailed, printable index to the John Clare Society Journal, the lead publication in the field of John Clare studies. John Clare (1793-1864) is in many ways the most important and exciting English poet of rural life, a major figure in the Romantic period, of great significance in terms of ecology and history, and a significant natural historian, satirical and folk poet and lifewriter.

In: Forrest, D. & Johnson, B. (eds.), Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain, Palgrave.

The self-conscious project of the BBC TV series Peaky Blinders (2013-) is apparent from its first episode. It opens amidst grimy tenement streets; a foreboding soundtrack anachronistically cites the ambiance of blues music; Chinese characters, their conversation subtitled, are summoned at the behest of a strikingly handsome and enigmatic man astride a white horse while the people of this abyss watch warily from doorways and behind dustbins and streetlamps. While the peak of a flat cap rather than Stetson shields the rider’s eyes, the aim is to pose a question about where and when this milieu might be. The answer comes in a caption: ‘Birmingham, 1919’.

Written by Stephen Knight and now in its second series, Peaky Blinders can be set alongside series such as Ripper Street (2012-), which makes the Victorian East End its milieu or, more directly, Downton Abbey (2010-). Katherine Byrne (2014) has argued that Downton Abbey offers a sanitized although insistently ‘authentic’, portrait of a historical period marked by instability and rapid change. The ‘post-heritage’ of this series draws its drama from the familiar iconography of the country home and the interplay of servant and employer, re-treading aspects of the 1970s BBC series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75). Peaky Blinders offers a different, and potentially radical political, historical and aesthetic perspective on the same period and nature of class relations, recalling political and social aspects of another 1970s series When the Boat Comes In (1976-81). The eponymous Peaky Blinders for instance comprise an illegal and violent bookmaking gang, tied by family loyalties and Gypsy identity. The central male characters are psychologically scarred by their experience of the Western Front while the women exhibit a strength and independence that comes from not simply being left to manage the home front. The city is akin to an inferno as industrial forges bellow flame into the street, a heat echoed in political reactions to communist agitation and IRA gunrunners managed by a brutal police force.

Peaky Blinders makes much of Birmingham’s place at the centre of a physical modernity as a means of installing it as a site for historical drama. David Stubbs has written in The Guardian that:

‘In 1919, Birmingham was the biggest industrial city in the world. Yet it has always been considered deeply unfashionable when it comes to settings for TV drama, while cities like Liverpool have been consecrated by the likes of Alan Bleasdale. "It is unfashionable," agrees Birmingham-born Knight. "In fact, it's almost invisible.’ (Stubbs, 2013).

The aim of this paper then is to explore the project of Peaky Blinders as one which explores a distinct and insistently regional working-class life, agency and interiority in the context of a largely unexplored industrial environment. It assesses how, in addressing a televisual (and historical) absence, Knight delights in the imaginative possibilities of milieu and character in which fictional characters and historical figures interact. In encompassing a variety of reactions to the series’ historical fidelity and adequacy as a representation of a specific time, place – and class - further questions arise about the ambiguities of representations of working class life on British television.

Toplumsal yapıyı anlamaya yönelik, mevcut dönemde uygulanan iktisat politikalarına dair verilen bilgiler, çoğu zaman toplum içerisinde insan olma halini yansıtmada yetersiz kalmaktadır. İnsanı genelleştiren bu çeşit bir bakış açısı, rakamların yoğunluğunda, asıl olan özneyi de görünmez kılarken; bireylerin cansız yığınlar halinde temsil edilmelerine yol açmaktadır
Bu çalışmanın amacı Türkiye’de 1945-1960 dönemi emek tarihi ve uygulanan iktisat politikalarına bakarken, aynı zamanda dönemin işçiler tarafından ne şekilde deneyimlendiğinin de incelenmesi; bu anlamda da edebi anlatılar üzerinden insana dair olanın görünür kılınmasıdır. İkinci Dünya Savaşı’nın ardından uluslar arası ölçekte yaşanan gelişmelerle de ilintili olarak, Türkiye dönem itibariyle hızlı bir kapitalistleşme sürecinden geçer. Bu esnada alt üst olan toplum yapısı, toplumsal hiyerarşide aşağıda bulunan bilhassa örgütsüz işçiler tarafından farklı tutunma ve direnme mekanizmalarının geliştirilmesine yol açar. Bu çalışmada Orhan Kemal’in Bereketli Topraklar Üzerinde, Eskici Ve Oğulları ve Murtaza romanlarına uygulanan nitel araştırma yöntemi aracılığıyla, bu dönemdeki çalışma yaşamının koşulları, bu koşulların geçirdiği dönüşüm süreci içerisinde, aydınlatılmaya çalışılmış; böylece, bu süreçte merkezi anlatıların dışında kalan işçilerin zihniyet yapıları ve anlam dünyalarının da açığa çıkarılması sağlanmıştır.

The present essay examines how the extraordinarily itinerant lyric “I” of the late Romantic poet John Clare constitutes a historical revision of the critical narratives of lyric containment and immediacy that consolidated from Victorian era onward and have recently been contested by lyric theorists of address, apostrophe, and history. Yet because Clare’s poetry critiques a particular historical moment when Britain saw itself as an enclosed island of enclosed estates, his work presents speakers whose irrepressible, traveling energies are not easily defined by any of today’s current theories of lyric. Clare’s revisionary “I”s stem from his sense that he had become as displaced, forgotten, and superseded as the unenclosed common greens of his childhood. Yet Clare’s alienation from the present moment of his writing also results from the neglect of his peasant poetry and his emotional sufferings as a semi-literate subject who experienced mental illness and was committed to an asylum. Together, these intense struggles against the historical, poetic, and personal pressures of enclosure positioned his work as out of sync with the chronologies and concerns of modernity. Clare transforms the poetic “I” into a haunting anachronism, an untimely vehicle that equally unsettles our ideas about lyric enclosure, apostrophe, and address.

We examine how child labour informed the ethos and conscience of one nineteenth-century American writer, and how her workplace memories from a Massachusetts textile mill emerged in literary form to replace a foreshortened childhood.  Lucy Larcom's narratives of child labour during the mid-1840s, published several decades later, represented an inherent advocacy of human developmental rights during a period when U.S. law did not acknowledge children's industrial labour as a social wrong.  Her advocacy was fragmentary and partial, mixed together with larger stories, and did not have an argumentative focus on child labour.  Larcom's continuing return to images and themes of child labour characterizes her writing more than its repetition of standard sentimental tropes of nature.  Her class consciousness of child labour contributed a subterranean radicalism that emerged with opportunity in the imagery of a poet otherwise careful to shape her market acceptability for middle-class Victorian America.  In order to examine that class consciousness, we will first address Larcom's autobiographical self-observations in A New England Girlhood (1889) concerning her life as a teenage factory worker, in order afterwards to contextualize representations of labour in her well-known antislavery poem “Weaving.”

During the 1950's and 60's, several "angry young men" rose to prominence in British theater. The most notable of these playwrights, John Osbourne, demonstrated the frustration felt by the working class in his play Look Back in Anger. Edward Bond, Britain's premier Marxist playwright, continues in Osbourne's tradition. Like Look Back in Anger, Bond's provoking play Saved uses shock tactics and violence as vehicles to express working class frustration. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Bond goes one step further.

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois's Hegelian concept of 'double consciousness' , as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.

Inspired by recent studies of Romantic botany and geology, this essay explores the intersection of the rise of the modern science of entomology and the insect poetics of the English laboring-class poet John Clare. Besides the formation of the Entomological Society of London (1833), Clare’s time saw the publication of William Spence and William Kirby’s Introduction to Entomology (1815-26), and John Curtis’s British Entomology (1824-39). Building on the common language that Romantic writers applied to the poetic imagination and the insect world (Coleridge’s “endless variety of form”), Kirby, Spence, and others traced the origins of song to insect sounds; moreover, they associated intention, mind, expression, and reception with insect motion and antennae.

Returning to the poetic entomology of the so-called Northamptonshire peasant, I argue, affords a vision of new nonhuman concepts of affect, language, aesthetics, and intelligence. A natural historian and descriptive poet, Clare builds on Kirby’s and Spence’s insights to account for the ways in which insects mediate between plant and animal kingdoms, local and global natures, and textual and real materials (ink and paper derived in part from insect life during the period). Coordinating the perceptive powers of the nature poet and the entomologist, Clare aligns the size, complexity, and camouflage of what he terms the “insect-world” (The Shepherd’s Calendar, [1827]) with the brevity, subtlety, and opacity of lyric form (Keats, Smith, and Wordsworth also wrote sonnets on insects).

Romantic entomology, which includes Clare’s farsighted poetic vision of weather-wise beetles, signifying grasshoppers, and ant architects, not only revises the “animal claim” that Tobias Menely has recently identified with the poetics of sensibility, but also anticipates present-day scientific discussions of nonhuman forms of rhythm, memory, temporality (the term “beetle” is an archaic word for “clock”), organization, and mass communication. To be sure, buzzing Romantic-era bugs suggest, on the one hand, the swarming clouds of universal pestilence, and, on the other, the juvenile microenvironments of minute ephemera. Simultaneously accounting for human famines and insect victims (the minute and helpless prey of the sporting boys and stalking birds whose songs scholars have more often analyzed), Clare’s insect poetics figures and anticipates a twenty-first century concern: a species capable of simultaneously representing the agent and object of ecological calamity.

Literary scholars have long searched for an unambiguous concept of working-class literature. This article tries a new approach: not based on a new classificatory concept but on a wider scope for new types of texts. Thus, conceiving of working-class literature as a phenomenon of family resemblance in Wittgenstein’s sense seems useful. Further, the concept of working-class literature might be supplemented by a concept of working-class literariness. Working-class literariness appears in texts expressing class-perspectives with the potential to desautomatize the process of perception and to provoke shifts of aspect. Especially instructive would be narratives where competing perspectives collide.
Devotional narratives of the late 1800s and the early 1900s depicting working-class motifs exemplify such collisions. A philantropic Christian outlook normally dominates, but is often blended with utopian socialism and confronted with strong counter-arguments delivered by militant workers. The alternative approach of this article is tested on such narratives to clarify what working-class literariness might look like.

The arrival of Commonwealth migrants to Britain following World War Two signalled the beginning of a significant change in the country’s class composition. However, such change was not achieved painlessly with the migrant experience of class inseparable from their experience of a racism ubiquitous at both institutional and interpersonal levels and its amelioration (however imperfect) the result of decades of collective struggle. Though the iconic anti-racist and black liberation struggles would only occur from the late-1960s onwards, their roots are to be found in the social and cultural formations of the immediate postwar period. The works of Caribbean and white British authors of the 1950s are essential to understanding these formations, recounting the daily struggles of Commonwealth migrants in postwar Britain and attempts at promoting their accommodation among working-class Britons; yet, perhaps more significantly, they also capture, in their most embryonic form, the initial configurations of a collective intersectional working-class politics. The texts depict potentials for unity with white working-class Britons, creating space for a pluralised ‘Britishness’ inclusive (at least in part) of blackness. As eminent Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall explained, ‘identity is in part always a narrative [...] It is that which is narrated in one’s own self.’ As this chapter shows, the legacy of many of the narratives produced in the immediate postwar period played a vital part in reconfiguring such British working-class identities.

“Dirty Work: Labor, Dissatisfaction and Everyday Life in Contemporary French Literature and Culture (1975-present),” is an analysis of the representation of everyday activities – namely, of work, leisure, and consumerism – in contemporary French novels and other cultural productions. This dissertation examines how these contemporary texts use narrative, generic, and stylistic experiments to represent cynicism and dissatisfaction with everyday life as the consequences of
neoliberal capitalist ideology and instrumentalist thinking, which define “work” as labor that produces commodities and profit and “leisure” as consumerism. In this way, these cultural productions critique capitalist instrumentalism for reducing human subjectivity to embodied economic struggle. I demonstrate how these texts portray dissatisfied laborers (and unemployed people) exhausted by unfulfilling work and financial precariousness, who implicate these conditions for thwarting their pursuit of more meaningful activities – artistic creation, meaningful work, love, community-building, political action – and existential freedom. By problematizing the effects of capitalist ideology, economic inequality, and received ideas about work and art, the texts in the corpus portray THE creative work, political consciousness, and social
engagement as essential to contemporary individuals’ sense of subjective fulfillment and of belonging within French society.

The corpus of this dissertation includes a wide range of authors, from best-selling novelists to “cult” underground figures: works by controversial but popular authors Michel Houellebecq and Frédéric Beigbeder; newer literary voices Nathalie Kuperman, Gauz, and Julien Campredon; and punk and underground writers Virginie Despentes, Kriss Vilà, and Jean-Louis Costes. In addition to fiction, the corpus includes songs, zines, and journalism. I read these narratives of everyday life – literary fiction, genre fiction, subcultural fiction, and other texts – through a critical lens informed by continental and Marxist philosophy, literary theory, and the social sciences. Finally, by recuperating the texts of subcultures for scholarly study, this dissertation also sheds timely critical light on texts overlooked by scholars for up to 43 years, illuminating their aesthetic and thematic correspondences with better-known works.

This paper explored how the subaltern modernism of three working-class Russian Jewish immigrant writers, involved with socialist and feminist movements, might provide different perspectives, traditions and paradigms with regards 'experimental literature'.

As a PhD student in literature studies in Singapore, people often ask me about my focus of study. When I tell them that I research working-class literature in Singapore and other Asian countries, their very first reaction is always a perplexed look followed by a rapid-fire of questions: “Who are the working class in Singapore? Do you mean workers can write literature?” Colleagues even dis- miss my topic, stating, “Your project is so political, it sounds like a sociological investigation rather than literary studies. We don’t do that here in Singapore.”These reactions, I believe, are conditioned by a significant lack of discourse on working-class literature in Singapore. The main aim of this essay, therefore, is to begin constructing such a dis- course. I will do this by analyzing from a historical perspective three working-class writers from Singapore – Chong Han (1945–), Tan Kok Seng (1939–), and MD Sharif Uddin (1978–).2 By analyzing these very different writers, I will delineate a rudimentary his- historical overview of working-class literature in Singapore, stressing the different possibilities and limits under various “production modes.” In line with John Lennon and Magnus Nilsson’s argument in their first edited collection Working-Class Literature(s), I will not offer a decisive resolution of what constitutes Singaporean working-class literature, but rather, I will explore this literature through the lens of “what it could be” (Lennon & Nilsson, 2017, p. 203). My essay can offer new perspectives to Singaporean literature studies including contributing to the study of “history from below.” In addition, my essay also contributes to the ongoing scholarly endeavours, of which this edited collection is an example, to map working-class literature from many countries and epochs from an international and comparative perspective."

‘Common Distress’ analyses the visionary connections that John Clare drew between the ostensibly separate physical, formal, pecuniary, and meteorological dimensions of stress and strain. Primarily considering Clare’s first two published volumes, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel and Other Poems (1821), my research explores the connections between harmony and harm as they specifically apply to the tradition of the distressed poet, Clare’s biographical circumstances, and the time of general distress defined by the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, the effects of the Corn Laws, and the return to the gold standard. In ‘The Poets Wish’, for example, Clare’s poetics of distress encompasses lyric and labour: ‘Invok’d the muse & scrig’d a strain’. To be sure, in the wake of the Age of Sensibility, Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (‘The Eeolian Harp’) represented the body as a lyric instrument whose vibrating nervous fibres could be agitated, soothed, or tuned. Yet Clare’s experiments with poetic stress move beyond representations of the speaker’s body as a working instrument. Far from anomalous, the strains of the distressed poet envision birds, atmospheres, shepherds, and bards as simultaneously under pressure. Taken together, Clare’s first two volumes imagine a new, radically inclusive poetic concept of community defined by common distress.

Urbanisation and rural-urban labour mobility are two founding traits of China's contemporary society and socioeconomic model. The connection between the two and the peculiar social mobility control system still in force, which bars non-urban residents from accessing basic services in the city, creates a new form of social stratification between the "centre" and the "periphery" of urban society, as well as a new subject in the city-one not fully urban, nor still peasant, but remaining an outsider in the city. Migrant-worker communities have formed, one of the foremost being Beijing's Picun urban village. In this paper, I analyse a corpus of poems published online in recent years by members of a literature group of migrant workers based in Picun. Reading them as a case of subjective representation of the social space of the city and the authors' positioning in its web of social relations, and adopting a socio-literary approach, I particularly focus on the relation with the rural home, urban alienation and anomie, and the effort for symbolic recognition, locating this production in the larger spheres of contemporary migrant-worker literature and urban literature. By doing so, I demonstrate that such a literature challenges the coherence and uniformity of the city's "text" (and identity), offering a multi-layer perspective of the socio-cultural production of urban space. If it is true, as David Frisby puts it, that the modern city is a place where strangers meet, textual representation can tell us a lot about how this encounter is perceived in the subjective realm (and the city itself may be quite a stranger to newcomers). With this in mind, this article endeavours to examine a set of poems authored by Chinese rural-urban migrants to determine how the city of Beijing is perceived by this specific kind of agent, the stranger to the city for institutional reasons even without crossing the nation's boundaries.

This book deals with the early Swedish working-class writer Maria Sandel (1870–1927), investigating the theme of popular education and Bildung in her writings from a literary and historical point of view. The issue is the compound meaning and significance of the idea of Bildung/education in her narrative and the unconventional literary devices and rhetorical strategies she uses to address her reader. Maria Sandel supported herself as an industrial seamstress in Stockholm, also engaging herself in the growing labour-movement. Although an autodidact, she published six books of prose-narrative and a large number of poems and short stories in the social-democratic press. All her writings depict everyday life in the poor working-class quarters of Stockholm, adopting a class-conscious perspective, focussing on the need of education as well as material improvement. Maria Sandel constantly strived to deepen and broaden her education. As a richly varied theme in her writings, education encompasses not only knowledge and learning, but also cultivation, manners and morals in the classical sense of Bildung. This book is devoted to the manifold view of education that is exposed in her narra-tive and is literary expressions. Analysis of themes and devices in her texts will show how her writings partly change from her debut in 1908 to her last book in 1927. The militant class-perspective of her early texts gradually shift toward a more conciliatory civic attitude, emphasizing individual moral-psychological maturation and bourgeois virtues like neatness, respectability, decency, order and stability. These tendencies reflect the ongoing societal development toward a class-transcending reformism and Social-democratic ideas of society as a folkhem (”home for the whole people”), made possible by the enforced parliamentary position of the labour party. A driving force for this development was the growing importance of popular education. This book is composed in ten chapters, presenting (1) an overview of the author-ship; (2–5) historical backgrounds concerning the current concept of Bildung; the ongoing industrialization and historical phases of the class-struggle; people’s education and the popular Bildungs-movement; and the various literary and cultural contexts of the time. Chapter 6–9 investigate Maria Sandel’s work in chronological order: the early collective class narratives (6–7), and the late novels of education and formation. The last chapter is a summary of results, also including a deepened discussion of the interaction of pragmatics, rhetoric, aesthetics, and literary tradition of Maria Sandel’s narrative.

This paper explored the way in which Olsen establishes a particular conception of history as a site of struggle in her story, 'Tell Me a Riddle.'

Presentation slides available here: http://prezi.com/56pwnjogfr5w/present/?auth_key=w3y0bah&follow=jvtxevurjsv3&kw=present-56pwnjogfr5w&rc=ref-56015513

Working-class writings often originated from self-taught writers. The access to “legitimate” culture sometimes took place through a mentor or scholarly institution. But the trade union movement implemented/created its own modes of training. Workers, women as well as men, therefore took the pen to write a whole variety of texts (poetry, stories, testimonials, newspaper articles, etc.) which were organized around three main polarities: daily writings, biographical narratives or militant texts. They thus responded to multiple functions: they were not only aimed at teaching, but also constituted modes of struggle and could include a literary ambition.

Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) blends Standard and Caribbean Englishes to create a hybrid literary idiom which articulates the oral culture and dialects of Windrush generation immigrants in London. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) similarly attempts to set the author’s Nottingham dialect alongside Standard English, challenging the capacity of the novel to articulate working-class consciousness. In these novels, dialect forms a challenge to the dominance of Standard English in literature and suggests the opening out of the form to articulate and represent a greater plurality of lived experience. Immigrants and the working class – groups historically marginalised in society and in the novel – were of central importance to Britain’s post-war recovery: in their sophisticated interplay of dialect and Standard English, these authors enact the realignment of British society in the fifties and subtly argue for the accommodation of marginalised groups within the cultural centre. Using Cairns Craig’s equation of dialect and dialectic alongside Homi Bhabha’s notions of mimicry and hybridity, this paper will assert the political significance of Selvon and Silltoe’s uses of dialect. It will also argue that dialect forms a productive area of commonality between texts usually categorised separately – in this case as ‘immigrant’/ ‘black’ writing and ‘working-class’ writing – and therefore helps to interrogate literary-critical categorisation itself.

This essay presents a detailed analysis of the works of three labouring-class poets who wrote in the "shadow" of Robert Burns: John Lapraik, David Sillar, and Janet Little. It assesses the influence of Burns upon their literary productions , finding that the "shadow" of Burns tended to diminish the works and reputations of his fellow labouring-class poets during this period.