A History of British Working Class Literature
Cambridge University Press, 4/27/2017
EAN 9781107190405, ISBN10: 1107190401
Hardcover, 496 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 3.2 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'; a Victorian self-improvement ethic; or as an aspect of the heroic workers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical culture. The present work contrastingly applies a wide variety of interpretive approaches to this literature. Essays on more familiar topics, such as the 'agrarian idyll' of John Clare, are mixed with entirely new areas in the field like working-class women's 'life-narratives'. This authoritative and comprehensive History explores a wide range of genres such as travel writing, the verse-epistle, the elegy and novels, while covering aspects of Welsh, Scottish, Ulster/Irish culture and transatlantic perspectives.
Introduction John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan
1. When 'Bread depends on her Character'
the problem of laboring-class subjectivity in the foundling hospital archive Jennie Batchelor
2. 'Stirr' d up by Emulation of the famous Mr Duck'
laboring-class poetry in the 1730s Jennifer Batt
3. The Verse Epistle and laboring-class literary sociability from Duck to Burns William J. Christmas
4. 'But Genius is the special Gift of God!'
the reclamation of 'Natural Genius' in the late eighteenth-century verses of Ann Yearsley and James Woodhouse Steve Van-Hagen
5. Alexander Wilson
the rise and fall and rise of a laboring-class writer Gerard Carruthers
6. Neither mute nor inglorious
Ann Yearsley and Elegy Kerri Andrews
7. 'British Bards'
the concept of laboring-class poetry in eighteenth-century Wales Mary-Ann Constantine
8. 'Behold in these Coromantees/the fate of an agonized world'
Edward Rushton's transnational radicalism Franca Dellarosa
9. Transnational Ulster and laboring-class self-fashioning Jennifer Orr
10. Working-class poetry and the Royal Literary Fund
two case studies in patronage Scott McEathron
11. The life of William Cobbett
caricature, hauntology and the impossibility of radical life writing in the romantic period Ian Haywood
12. John Clare's Agrarian Idyll
a confluence of pastoral and Georgic Gary Harrison
13. 'And aft thy dear Doric aside I hae flung, to busk oot my sang wi' the prood Southron tongue'
the Antiphonal Muse in Janet Hamilton's poetics Kaye Kossick
14. 'The guilty game of human subjugation'
religion as ideology in Thomas Cooper's The Purgatory of Suicides Mike Sanders
15. At the margins of print
life-narratives of Victorian working-class women Florence S. Boos
16. The newspaper press and the Victorian working-class poet Kirstie Blair
17. Tensions, transformations and local identity
the evolving meanings of nineteenth-century Tyneside dialect songs Rod Hermeston
18. On the road
all manner of tramps in English and Scottish writing from the 1880s to the 1920s H. Gustav Klaus
19. Ethel Carnie Holdsworth
genre, serial fiction and popular reading patterns Nicola Wilson
20. 'The young men of the nation'
Alexander Baron and urban working-class masculinity Anthony Cartwright
21. Kathleen Dayus
the girl from Hockley Sharon Ouditt
22. 'It have a kind of communal feeling with the Working Class and the spades'
Sam Selvon, Tony Harrison and 'Colonization in Reverse' Jack Windle
23. Clannish confines
the folk, the proletariat and the people in modern Scottish literature Corey Gibson
24. A critical minefield
the haunting of the Welsh working-class novel Lisa Sheppard and Aidan Byrne
25. Transforming working-class writers and writing
digital editions, projects and analyses Cole Crawford
Afterword Brian Maidment.