Class Fictions

Class Fictions PDF Author: Pamela Fox
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the concept of class shame, she produces a model of working-class subjectivity that understands resistance in a more accurate and useful way—as a complicated kind of refusal, directed at both dominated and dominant culture. With a focus on certain classics in the working-class literary "canon," such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Love on the Dole, as well as lesser-known texts by working-class women, Fox uncovers the anxieties that underlie representations of class and consciousness. Shame repeatedly emerges as a powerful counterforce in these works, continually unsettling the surface narrative of protest to reveal an ambivalent relation toward the working-class identities the novels apparently champion. Class Fictions offers an equally rigorous analysis of cultural studies itself, which has historically sought to defend and value the radical difference of working-class culture. Fox also brings to her analysis a strong feminist perspective that devotes considerable attention to the often overlooked role of gender in working-class fiction. She demonstrates that working-class novels not only expose master narratives of middle-class culture that must be resisted, but that they also reveal to us a need to create counter narratives or formulas of working-class life. In doing so, this book provides a more subtle sense of the role of resistance in working class culture. While of interest to scholars of Victorian and working-class fiction, Pamela Fox’s argument has far-reaching implications for the way literary and cultural studies will be defined and practiced.

Common People

Common People PDF Author: Kit de Waal
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1783527471
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Working-class stories are not always tales of the underprivileged and dispossessed. Common People is a collection of essays, poems and memoir written in celebration, not apology: these are narratives rich in barbed humour, reflecting the depth and texture of working-class life, the joy and sorrow, the solidarity and the differences, the everyday wisdom and poetry of the woman at the bus stop, the waiter, the hairdresser. Here, Kit de Waal brings together thirty-three established and emerging writers who invite you to experience the world through their eyes, their voices loud and clear as they reclaim and redefine what it means to be working class. Features original pieces from Damian Barr, Malorie Blackman, Lisa Blower, Jill Dawson, Louise Doughty, Stuart Maconie, Chris McCrudden, Lisa McInerney, Paul McVeigh, Daljit Nagra, Dave O’Brien, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Anita Sethi, Tony Walsh, Alex Wheatle and more.

A Working Class State of Mind

A Working Class State of Mind PDF Author: Colin Burnett
Publisher: Leamington Books
ISBN: 1914090225
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Written entirely in East coast Scots A Working Class State of Mind, the debut book by Colin Burnett, brings the everyday reality and language of life in Scotland to the surface. Colin's fiction takes themes in the social sciences and animates them in vivid ethnographic portrayals of what it means to be working class in Scotland today. Delving into the tragic exploits of Aldo as well as his long time suffering best friends Dougie and Craig, the book follows these and other characters as they make their way in a city more divided along class lines than ever before.

Class Fictions

Class Fictions PDF Author: Pamela Fox
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the concept of class shame, she produces a model of working-class subjectivity that understands resistance in a more accurate and useful way—as a complicated kind of refusal, directed at both dominated and dominant culture. With a focus on certain classics in the working-class literary "canon," such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Love on the Dole, as well as lesser-known texts by working-class women, Fox uncovers the anxieties that underlie representations of class and consciousness. Shame repeatedly emerges as a powerful counterforce in these works, continually unsettling the surface narrative of protest to reveal an ambivalent relation toward the working-class identities the novels apparently champion. Class Fictions offers an equally rigorous analysis of cultural studies itself, which has historically sought to defend and value the radical difference of working-class culture. Fox also brings to her analysis a strong feminist perspective that devotes considerable attention to the often overlooked role of gender in working-class fiction. She demonstrates that working-class novels not only expose master narratives of middle-class culture that must be resisted, but that they also reveal to us a need to create counter narratives or formulas of working-class life. In doing so, this book provides a more subtle sense of the role of resistance in working class culture. While of interest to scholars of Victorian and working-class fiction, Pamela Fox’s argument has far-reaching implications for the way literary and cultural studies will be defined and practiced.

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.

Home in British Working-Class Fiction

Home in British Working-Class Fiction PDF Author: Nicola Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131712135X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. As Nicola Wilson shows, the history of the British working classes has often been written from the outside, with observers looking into the world of the inhabitants. Here Wilson engages with the long cultural history of this gaze and asks how ’home’ is represented in the writing of authors who come from a working-class background. Her book explores the depiction of home as a key emotional and material site in working-class writing from the Edwardian period through to the early 1990s. Wilson presents new readings of classic texts, including The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Love on the Dole and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, analyzing them alongside works by authors including James Hanley, Walter Brierley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Barker, James Kelman and the rediscovered ’ex-mill girl novelist’ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Wilson's broad understanding of working-class writing allows her to incorporate figures typically ignored in this context, as she demonstrates the importance of home's role in the making and expression of class feeling and identity.

A History of British Working Class Literature

A History of British Working Class Literature PDF Author: John Goodridge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108121306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 815

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Book Description
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.

Rosie of the River

Rosie of the River PDF Author: Catherine Cookson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0552147125
Category : Boats and boating
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Although entirely fictional, Rosie of the River was inspired by Catherine Cookson’s own experience of holidaying on the Norfolk Broads with her husband Tom. It is yet another example of the prodigious talent of Britain’s best-loved author. When Fred Carpenter suggests to his wife, Sally, that they should take a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads, she is filled with trepidation. Nevertheless she summons her courage and they and their bull-terrier Bill set off, with Fred at the helm of Dogfish Three. Sally’s misgivings are soon justified, as a series of disasters, human, nautical and canine, threaten to ruin their holiday. Then everything changes as they make friends with the boating fraternity and encounter the remarkable 15-year-old Rosie, whose family history stirs their curiosity and sympathy. As a result, Fred and Sally decide to support Rosie’s efforts to better herself — and are rewarded when she finds love and happiness.

A History of American Working-Class Literature

A History of American Working-Class Literature PDF Author: Nicholas Coles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108509029
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A History of American Working-Class Literature sheds light not only on the lived experience of class but the enormously varied creativity of working-class people throughout the history of what is now the United States. By charting a chronology of working-class experience, as the conditions of work have changed over time, this volume shows how the practice of organizing, economic competition, place, and time shape opportunity and desire. The subjects range from transportation narratives and slave songs to the literature of deindustrialization and globalization. Among the literary forms discussed are memoir, journalism, film, drama, poetry, speeches, fiction, and song. Essays focus on plantation, prison, factory, and farm, as well as on labor unions, workers' theaters, and innovative publishing ventures. Chapters spotlight the intersections of class with race, gender, and place. The variety, depth, and many provocations of this History are certain to enrich the study and teaching of American literature.

American Working-class Literature

American Working-class Literature PDF Author: Nicholas Coles
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 964

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Book Description
American Working-Class Literature is an edited collection containing over 300 oieces of literature by, about, and in the interests of the working class in America. Organized in a broadly historical fashion, with texts are grouped around key historical and cultural developments in working-class life, this volume records the literature of the working classes from the early laborers of the 1600 up until the present.

Mechanic Accents

Mechanic Accents PDF Author: Michael Denning
Publisher: London ; New York : Verso
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Factory Firls and Upperclass Seducers; the Molly Maguires and the Knights of Labor; Pinkertons and Tramps; Deadwood Dick and the James Gang: the 'dime novel' was the most widely read literature of the nineteenth century. It was also the contested tarrain of ideological class struggle, between middle-class moralism and the 'mechanic accents' of popular sensationalism. This is the first detailed study of the American dime novel phenomenom in an international context. Theorhetically informed by Marx, Gramsci, Bakhtin and Fredric Jameson among others. Dennings brings to bear and unrivalled knowledge of the primary material. The book explores both the social conditions which led to their popularity and the thematic conventions of the dime novels themselves. He concludes that their central function - representing the utopian longings of their working-class readerships - has been missed by critics of these cheap fictions. Mechanic Accents adds a new dimension to our understanding of the 'artisan republican' ideology of the nineteenth-century working class as well as the origins of the 'culture industry'. [Summary from back cover]