British Industrial Fictions

British Industrial Fictions PDF Author: H. Gustav Klaus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This volume represents the contexts, aspirations and dramas experienced by the people who worked in industry in Britain for 200 years. This fictional material was usually produced in conscious resistance to the dominent culture of the day, sometimes by middle-class sympathisers, but often by workers themselves who found time, somehow, to write about their stark experiences.

British Industrial Fictions

British Industrial Fictions PDF Author: H. Gustav Klaus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume represents the contexts, aspirations and dramas experienced by the people who worked in industry in Britain for 200 years. This fictional material was usually produced in conscious resistance to the dominent culture of the day, sometimes by middle-class sympathisers, but often by workers themselves who found time, somehow, to write about their stark experiences.

Factory Lives

Factory Lives PDF Author: James R. Simmons, Jr
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 9781551112725
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
Factory Lives contains four works of great importance in the field of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography: John Brown’s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe; William Dodd’s A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd; Ellen Johnston’s “Autobiography”; and James Myles’s Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy. This Broadview edition also includes a remarkably rich selection of historical documents that provide context for these works. Appendices include contemporary responses to the autobiographies, debates on factory legislation, transcripts of testimony given before parliamentary committees on child labour, and excerpts from literary works on factory life by Harriet Martineau, Frances Trollope, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.

British Working-Class Fiction

British Working-Class Fiction PDF Author: Roberto del Valle Alcalá
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474273769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
British Fiction and the Struggle Against Work offers an account of British literary responses to work from the 1950s to the onset of the financial crisis of 2008/9. Roberto del Valle Alcalá argues that throughout this period, working-class writing developed new strategies of resistance against the social discipline imposed by capitalist work. As the latter becomes an increasingly pervasive and inescapable form of control and as its nature grows abstract, diffuse, and precarious, writing about it acquires a new antagonistic quality, producing new forms of subjective autonomy and new imaginaries of a possible life beyond its purview. By tracing a genealogy of working-class authors and texts that in various ways defined themselves against the social discipline imposed by post-war capitalism, this book analyses the strategies adopted by workers in their attempts to identify and combat the source of their oppression. Drawing on the work of a wide range of theorists including Deleuze and Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, Alcalá offers a systematic and innovative account of British literary treatments of work. The book includes close readings of fiction by Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Nell Dunn, Pat Barker, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Monica Ali, and Joanna Kavenna.

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction PDF Author: Phil O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000763285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction looks at how the twenty-first-century British novel has explored contemporary working-class life. Studying the works of David Peace, Gordon Burn, Anthony Cartwright, Ross Raisin, Jenni Fagan, and Sunjeev Sahota, the book shows how they have mapped the shift from deindustrialisation through to stigmatization of individuals and communities who have experienced profound levels of destabilization and unemployment. O'Brien argues that these novels offer ways of understanding fundamental aspects of contemporary capitalism for the working class in modern Britain, including, class struggle, inequality, trauma, social abjection, racism, and stigmatization, exclusively looking at British working-class literature of the twenty-first century.

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1945-2010

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1945-2010 PDF Author: David James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110704023X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 provides insight into the critical traditions shaping the literary landscape of modern Britain.

Chartist Fiction

Chartist Fiction PDF Author: Ian Haywood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317241762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
First published in 2001. When the Chartist leader Ernest Jones emerged from prison in 1850, he was determined to capture the public’s attention with a controversial and topical novel. The result of his endeavours was the remarkable Woman’s Wrongs, a series of five tales exploring women’s oppression at every level of society from the working class to the aristocracy. Each story presents a graphic, often harrowing account of the social, economic and emotional victimization of women, and taken together the tales comprise a devastating indictment of Victorian patriarchal attitudes and sexual inequalities. In his substantial Introduction, Ian Haywood places the novel in the context of Jones’s career as a Chartist author and editor, and in the wider context of the ‘woman question’. Some of the topics covered by the Introduction include: the radical press and popular enlightenment, Jones’s rivalry with George W. M. Reynolds, and the needlewoman as radical icon. This title will be of interest to students of history.

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018 PDF Author: Peter Boxall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110863687X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
From 1980 to the present, huge transformations have occurred in every area of British cultural life. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 ushered in a new neoliberal era in politics and economics that dramatically reshaped the British landscape. Alongside this political shift, we have seen transformations to the public sphere caused by the arrival of the internet and of social media, and changes in the global balance of power brought about by 9/11, the emergence of China and India as superpowers, and latterly the British vote to leave the European Union. British fiction of the period is intimately interwoven with these historical shifts. This collection brings together some of the most penetrating critics of the contemporary, to explore the role that the British novel has had in shaping the cultural landscape of our time, at a moment, in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016, when the question of what it means to be British has become newly urgent.

The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction PDF Author: Philip Tew
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441168532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1980s shape contemporary British fiction? Setting the fiction squarely within the context of Conservative politics and questions about culture and national identity, this volume reveals how the decade associated with Thatcherism frames the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, and Graham Swift, of Scottish novelists and new diasporic writers. How and why 1980s fiction is a response to particular psychological, social and economic pressures is explored in detail. Drawing on the rise of individualism and the birth of neo-liberalism, contributors reflect on the tense relations between 1980s politics and realism, and between elegy and satire. Noting the creation of a 'heritage industry' during the decade, the rise of the historical novel is also considered against broader cultural changes. Viewed from the perspective of more recent theorisations of crisis following both 9/11 and the 21st-century financial crash, this study makes sense of why and how writers of the 1980s constructed fictions in response to this decade's own set of fundamental crises.

The 'Invisible Hand' and British Fiction, 1818-1860

The 'Invisible Hand' and British Fiction, 1818-1860 PDF Author: E. Courtemanche
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230304982
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
The 'invisible hand', Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored in this text as being far more subtle and intricate than is usually understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his model of ironic causality in complex societies and turned it to their own purposes.

Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature

Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature PDF Author: Adrian Tait
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000923053
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This innovative new book combines environmental justice scholarship with a material ecocriticism to explore the way in which early Victorian literature (1837–1860) responded to the growing problem of environmental injustice. As this book emphasises, environmental injustice – simply, the convergence of poverty and pollution – was not an isolated phenomenon, but a structural form of inequality; a product of industrial modernity’s radical reformation of British society, it particularly affected the working classes. As each chapter reveals in detail, this form of environmental inequality (or ‘classism’) drew sharply critical reactions from figures as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, and from within the Chartist movement, as working-class writers themselves reacted to the hazardous realities of a divided society. But as this book also reveals, these writers recognised that a truly just society respects the needs of the nonhuman and takes account of the material world in all its own aliveness; even if only tentatively, they reached for a more inclusive, emergent form of justice that might address the social and ecological impacts of industrial modernity, an idea which is no less relevant today. This book represents an indispensable resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Victorian literature, environmental justice, and ecocriticism.