Working-Class Literature

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.

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.

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

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

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.

s 1933 novel Love on the Dole was hugely successful when it was first published and the stage adaptation was seen by a million people before the decade's end.1 A screenplay was rejected by the British Board of Film Censors in 1936 before its secretary in 1940 summoned Greenwood and Ronald Gow, who had written the stage adaptation, telling them a film version was imperative for war propaganda purposes.2 This contradictory turn of events set the tone for the receptionof the text ever since. This article will appraise the existing criticism of Love onthe Dole and advance a new reading attuned to its northern, working-class provenance. The first half will focus on the tendency in criticism to attack Greenwood's ideological position and underplay the literary and linguistic ingenuity of his narrative technique and the second will explore the text's radical and feminist elements and its part in the development of a workingclass literary tradition. Responses to the text reflect changing trends on the academic left and its tendency to focus on discourse, ideology and aesthetics at the expense of a detailed and sympathetic understanding of a text's historicity. This article will address problems arising from this tendency, interpreting the text from a critical perspective grounded in working-class history and sensitive and sympathetic to the specificities of northern industrial class struggle. This sympathetic historicism will allow a fuller appreciation of the novel's artistic complexity, whilst suggesting ways in which criticism might better engage with working-class cultural production.

Drama played an important but under-recognized role in the dynamic counterculture of Chartism, the working-class protest movement for political rights. Making use of a wide range of theatrical genres, the Chartists staged amateur productions in their own associations and held frequent benefits in many of London’s largest working-class theaters. They recontextualized an array of published plays and produced such original works as John Watkins’s John Frost, a Chartist Play (1841) and reenactments of the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet’s 1803 trial. Within Chartism, drama exemplified a form of collaborative labor that advanced claims about the capacity of working-class people to imagine and create alternative social formations. It also functioned as a means of debating the most pressing issues that the Chartists faced, including the potential and limits of political violence. Whereas Chartist poetry commonly shied away from endorsing “physical force,” on stage Chartists instantiated revolutionary crowds and enacted the threat of governmental reprisal.

On the usefulness of works by Adorno, Hoggart and Anderson in studying popular music, with particular reference to Lennon and McCartney. Chapter from AHRC-funded doctoral thesis (Leeds Metropolitan University, 2010). Examiners: Professor Max Farrar and Professor Sheila Whiteley.

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.

Class background affects our ways of being in the world. Class leads us to feel at home in some places and alienated in others. It structures the way we see social phenomena even before we find the language with which to think. It affects language itself, not just by shaping the languages we have available at different stages in our lives, but also by shaping the associations between certain forms of language and power (Charlesworth 1999: 86-87, 213-214). Not surprisingly then, it affects practices of reading and writing about literature in a hegem-onic institution like the university. In this chapter, I discuss the influence of class-based inequality on scholarly writing in relation to the current reevaluation of "critique" as a scholarly norm, suggesting that rhetoric that draws on scholars' working-class upbringings can be part of a "renewed engagement with art and its entanglement with social life" (Felski 2015: 191).

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.

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 Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle) was an anarchist newspaper, known today for the views of editor Luigi Galleani, whose ideas are associated with multiple bombings carried out in the United States throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the First Red Scare and the executed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. A broad reading of the Cronaca Sovversiva, which focusses on more than its connections to controversy, violence and repression, reveals how a periodical produced by a wide range of artists, writers and activists became central to how many Italian immigrants understood and engaged with industrial capitalism. This paper argues that the Cronaca Sovversiva built an audience over time by incorporating a wide range of perspectives, addressing local and global issues and linking readers with other forms of literature as well as community events and projects. Diverse works of radical literature, art and announcements in the periodical, set within the predictable, repetitious framework of a weekly community paper, allowed a germinating militant movement to develop throughout and outside the Cronaca Sovversiva's pages.

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.

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.

Located at the intersections of new modernism, urban, and minority studies, Weimar Contact Zones examines the interplay between modernism, urban imaginaries, and the cultural production of the workers’ movement. While the Weimar Republic has long occupied a paradigmatic place in discussions of modernity and modernism in literary and cultural studies, proletarian literature and the analytical category of class have played only a marginal role. Bringing canonical Weimar literature together with the marginalized tradition of workers’ movement literature, film, and performance, the dissertation demonstrates that urban spaces functioned as contact zones where different groups interacted across lines of class and where hybridizations across boundaries of high and low culture occurred. The cultural production of the workers’ movement becomes visible as a tradition that articulated and appropriated modernist aesthetics to catalyze and represent, from the standpoint of proletarian collectives, social transformation. Understood from this perspective, modernism is not limited to high modernism or the historical avant-garde, but includes alternative cultural forms that articulate modern experiences of the lower classes. Weimar Contact Zones in this way also challenges the opposition between modernism and realism, which typically aligns workers’ movement literature with realism. The dissertation analyzes literary works by Anna Seghers, Franz Jung, Klaus Neukrantz, Kurt Kläber, Karl Grünberg, and the movie "Kuhle Wampe, Or Who Owns the World?", among others.

To Make Visible the Everyday Life of Workers: A Realistic View of 1940s and 1950s via “On Fertile Lands”

The period of 1945 and 1960 witnessed the very first levels of dramatic changes such as mechanization, disintegration of rural life, immigration from rural to urban areas, increasing population of urban slums which all affected the social outlook considerably. In Turkey as in most developing countries, relatively in a very short time, rapid development of such changes influenced the society severely. Nevertheless, many of the present surveys have no interest in the time period before 1960. Moreover, the number of surveys that inform us about the way in which those changes, which occurred in the socio-economic structure of that period, transformed the everyday life of workers and how those transformations were
perceived by the workers is very limited.
In this paper, first of all, together with the consideration of the changes took place at international scale after the Second World War; the economic-policies were implemented in Turkey during the period of 1945 and 1960 will be examined profoundly. Later, for the purpose of understanding how these changes were perceived by workers and making clear the subject of this analysis, this time period will be overviewed by the related novel of Orhan Kemal, is called “On Fertile Lands”. The reason for employing the method of text analysis is to expose the re-investigation of this time period by a different perspective and distinct life experiences. The aim of this paper, instead of reaching a certain conclusion; is to introduce different resources provide us with some clues about the way in which the
voiceless groups perceive the changes, which arise from the social structure and in this sense, initiate a discussion about literature.
Keywords: Labour history, everyday life, On Fertile Lands, Orhan Kemal, working life.

"Este artículo investiga ciertos proyectos filantrópicos dirigidos a la clase obrera en el siglo XIX español: tradicionalmente estudiados y concebidos como movimientos de liberación y emancipación, mostramos sus estrategias para insertar al obrero dentro de un orden socio-económico burgués. Partimos del análisis de El libro del obrero, publicado en 1862 por intelectuales de la burguesía catalana (Ceferino Tresserra, Víctor Balaguer, Antonio Altadill, entre otros) y regalado a los obreros
industriales catalanes que participaban en los coros de obreros de José Anselmo Clavé. Demostramos que en este libro se despliega una retórica bibliopolítica con el fin de restringir la autonomía económica, política y cultural de la clase trabajadora.
El libro del obrero contiene el proyecto educativo del intelectual decimonónico para la clase obrera organizada en coros, y se presenta como un manual pedagógico gracias al cual el obrero puede adquirir una conducta adaptada a la versión burguesa del orden social. Lejos de suponer una vía para la emancipación
de los obreros, la publicación y distribución de este tipo de manuales es un recurso usado por los intelectuales para proteger su propio estatuto dentro del espacio de representación urbano, al tiempo que crean su personalidad filantrópica."

The literature of ‘Windrush Generation’ authors invariably (and perhaps necessarily) found themselves engaged in debates regarding race, class and their articulation in the postwar Caribbean migrant experience. In this respect, an analysis of their narrative strategies serves as useful indicator for authorial attitudes towards contemporary black working-class politico-cultural tendencies. Applying concepts originating with Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Vološinov to authors ER Braithwaite, Sam Selvon and George Lamming, I highlight the ways in which language exists as a site of struggle; yet by bringing their analyses into Caribbean London, I show how such struggle must be conceived as inherently intersectional, allowing us to understand how their narrative strategies function as methods of navigating the structures of class and race in Britain and their manifestations in language.

Research on social mobility in Italy has shown that social class has been, and still is, a crucial factor conditioning individual opportunities in the field of schooling and work. This article draws upon thirty life stories of middle and working-class people with the same social background. They were born in Turin during the Italian "economic miracle" from working-class-Southern Italian families. By analysing their life stories, the aim of this article is to reflect upon some of the mechanisms that have made intergenerational social mobility particularly difficult for the offspring of immigrants workers in the city of Turin during decades of extraordinary expansion of educational and working opportunities. It is shown how subjects position within the social and urban space, as well as their migratory background, produced a specific configuration of economic, cultural and social resources available to them. These resources were intertwined with processes of social identification and stigmatization showing how, in the context studied, early school leaving and working-class jobs were commonly seen as «natural» and unproblematic life choices.

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is not a criticism of the variety of approaches to class. There is no such a claim. Here, a more general context, we will focus on two main directions or two main components of the dialectical method on approach to the reality of class: Connectedness (relational), and historicity ... It is not possible to distinguish between the two. However, we will consider in the two sections in terms of presentation.

ÖZET
Bu yazının amacı, sınıfa dair çeşitli yaklaşımların serimlenmesi ve eleştirisi değildir. Böyle bir iddiası yoktur. Burada, daha genel bir çerçevede; iki temel yön üzerinde, sınıf gerçekliğine ve kavsamsallığına yaklaşımda diyalektik yöntemin iki temel bileşeni üzerinde duracağız: Bağlantılılık (ilişkisellik) ve tarihsellik… Bu ikisini birbirinden ayırmak mümkün değildir. Ancak biz sunum açısından iki ayrı başlık halinde ele alacağız.

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.”

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.

In this article, we compare the phenomenon of working-class literature in Sweden and the United States. After examining how working-class literatures have evolved in both countries, we analyze how they have been conceptualized in two academic fields: contemporary U.S. working-class studies and the study of Swedish literary history. We discuss the material and historical contexts shaping these conceptualizations, critique them on theoretical grounds, and offer ways that comparative approaches help us better understand the phenomenon of working-class literature. Our main argument is that our analysis makes visible two important features of this literature. The first of these, inscribed in the very concept of the term, is that working-class literature is both a literary phenomenon and a phenomenon relating to working-class life. The second feature – a far less obvious, but not less important one – is that working-class literatures are always historically and geographically situated and, thus, assume divergent shapes in different times and locations. We argue that working-class literature as a phenomenon is, therefore, always in a process of new formations. In doing so, we move away from narrow nationalistic views of working-class literature as a defined term and, using a comparative approach, allow for new vantage points in the analysis of the relationship between class and culture.

This chapter deals with genre concieved as rhetorical action and cognitive schema associated with an exigence or social need, calling for utterance and action. Genres in this sense are chronotopes, permeated with addressivity and instruments of knowledge, interpretation, and communication rather than taxonomic systems. This concept of genre will be further illuminated by the example of early Swedish working-class fiction as a new literature of low-brow hybridicty and multigeneric origin, created by autodidactic authors without conventional education and cultural prestige. Focus will be on how this fiction came into generic being in the early 1900s’ by combining narrative traditions in the margins of classic realism, symbolism, and protomodernisms of the day. The aim of the chapter is to find out how addressivity and form-shaping ideologies are generated out of such blendings, how cognitive schemata are set at work, and how generic worlds as chronotopes will mediate the themes.

This explores Abbey plays set in Irish cities, from its founding through the summer of 1951. It seeks to broaden the discourse on modern Anglo-Irish drama generally, and at the Abbey Theatre specifically. It shows that although the urban repertoire was in the minority, it was the financial backbone of the Abbey in its early decades and often led to significant shifts in its operating policies.

"Bir insan her zaman hikaye anlatıcısıdır; kendi hikayeleriyle ve başkalarının hikayeleriyle çevrili yaşar; başına gelen her şeyi onlar aracılığıyla görür ve haya-tını anlatıyormuş gibi yaşamaya çalışır." (Sartre, 1967: 63)

Bu yazıda, sınıf ve sanat başlığının genel olarak sosyal bilimler daha özelinde ise sosyal politika alanınındaki yerine dair bir tartışma açmayı ve kimi soruları gündeme getirmeyi amaçlıyorum. Bu konuyu gündeme getirme ve tartışma sürecim, 2006-2007 yıllarında başlayıp, bugüne değin uzanıyor. Konunun kendi hayatımda da izdüşümleri olan, olgusal görünümlerinin zaman içerisindeki değişimi, benim açımdan da bu değişimle konuyu zaman zaman yeniden düşünmeyi ve ele almayı beraberinde getirdi. Bu görünümleri aşağıda daha detaylıca, yer yer kendi deneyimlerimden de hareket ederek açıklayacağım. Böylelikle sınıf ve sanat başlıklarının biraradalığının, sosyal politika alanında (ve de bu alanla yakın temasta olan kimi başka alanlardaki) seyrinin iniş çıkışlarının da bilincinde olarak, bugün geldiğimiz noktada ne gibi açılımlar ve olanaklar sağlayabileceği bu iki başlığı yanyana getirirken nelere dikkat etmeliyiz gibi soruları tartışmaya açmak istiyorum. Zira sınıf ve sanat başlıkları ekseninde ortaya koyulan çalışmaların halen kısıtlı düzeyde olsa da, görünür biçimde niceliksel artışı olmakla beraber, bu alanda yöntemsel bir tartışmadan kaçınılması (ve uygulamaya aktarılmaması) dikkat çekicidir. Oysaki tam aksine, bu eksende yapılacak çalışmalar öncesinde bir yöntemsel düşünme pratiği ve tartışma gereklidir. Aksi halde araştırmacının sanat alanının kendine içkin özellikleri ve bu biraradalığa katacağı zenginlik ve imkanlara bakmayı reddetmesi, önünü kesmesi, sınırlaması vb. şekillerde çoğal-tılabilecek birçok sonucu beraberinde getirir. Bu yazı, kısmi olarak aktardığım kendi deneyim ve gözlemlerimin de eşlik ettiği böyle bir tartışma gündemine işaret etmekte ve kaçınılan bu durumu etkinleştirmeyi hedeflemektedir. Aynı zamanda yazı bu haliyle, yazılacak kapsamlı bir makalenin deneyimle zenginleştirilmiş ilk notları olarak görülmelidir.

With the aim of contributing to scholarly discussions about how to conceptualise the relationship between the art form of comics and the working class, this article analyses the Swedish comics artist Mats Källblad’s graphic novel Hundra år i samma klass [A Hundred Years in the Same Class], focusing on its self-reflexive discussion and problematising of the idea about comics as a working-class art form. Special attention is given to intertextual connections to Swedish working-class literature and to Källblad’s questioning of the idea that the opposition between popular and highbrow culture should be analogous with that between the working class and the bourgeoisie.

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'.

In the late 1800s, various ideas of Socialism had spread in Sweden. Simultaneously, questions of religion, Christianity, and the Church were urgent, engaging even advocates of socialism. Yet, the resistance to both Christianity and Socialism was considerable, and reconciling the two was a delicate matter. This essay studies the intriguing interaction between Socialism and Christianity in Swedish prose fiction of the early 1900s, especially devotional narratives and working-class fiction. At issue is the tension between spiritual-idealistic and economic-materialistic tendencies, how the handling of this tension is depicted, and what imaginations of Socialism and Christianity this depiction testifies to. The analysis shows that the borders between Christian and socialist imaginations were not clear-borders between Christian and socialist imaginations were not clear-cut.

This paper claims that the archetypical theme of the death of the father has acquired new significance in contemporary Italian novels that revolve around the theme of work. After showing how this literary topos appears in the production of an earlier generation of writers (Buzzi and Parise in particular), the paper explores the way in which twenty-first century writers have transformed its meaning to make it relevant to contemporary concerns about work. Using examples from such authors as Bajani, Nata, Pennacchi, Prunetti, Rea, and Valenti, the paper argues that these writers use the death of the father as a metaphor of the existential anxieties resulting from the contemporary world of work.

Traditionally, biography has been one of the weakest genres of communist historiography. In a country like Britain, where the communist party (the CPGB) had a peak membership in the 1940s of perhaps 55,000 and never elected more than two MPs, its leading figures held few obvious attractions for the conventional political biographer. Moreover, if proximity to power was not an inducement to explore their lives, personality and persuasion offered little compensation either. Not only were private papers rarely accessible, but the public face of communism was one relentlessly prioritising the collective over the individual, even in respect of the life histories which communists constructed. Though there did exist a public genre of exemplary party lives, these were notorious for their reticence and even mendacity and in Britain at least have received little scholarly attention. Nevertheless, because the issue of personality and its suppression was so central to the culture of communism, the study of these narratives can provide crucial insights into the construction of both individual and collective party identities and the interconnections between them. Already in France, with its well-established traditions of prosopographical research, they have given rise to an extensive, sophisticated literature including important published colloquia of international scope. What nevertheless remains somewhat undeveloped is the comparative dimension of this literature. Apart from the obvious practical considerations, a possible reason for this is the perceived uniformity of communist political culture. Like other aspects of the communist experience, the creation of a standardized party 'life' and personality has sometimes been seen as essentially transnational in character, with communism constituting a 'unitary system' which in the Stalin period was becoming not only politically but to some degree sociologically homogenized. Without entering into the larger debate of which this forms part, these questions are explored here by revisiting the published memoirs of the British communist leader, Harry Pollitt (1890-1960), and comparing them with the analogous productions of his French counterpart, Maurice Thorez (1900-64), and the American party chairman, William Z. Foster (1881-1961).

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.