British Working-Class Writing for Children

Scholarship Boys in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Haru Takiuchi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319553894
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319553900
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

This book explores how working-class writers in the 1960s and 1970s significantly reshaped British children's literature through their representations of working-class life and culture. Aidan Chambers, Alan Garner and Robert Westall were examples of what Richard Hoggart termed 'scholarship boys': working-class individuals who were educated out of their class through grammar school education. This book highlights the role these writers played in changing the publishing and reviewing practices of the British children's literature industry while offering new readings of their novels featuring scholarship boys. As well as drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu, and referring to studies of scholarship boys in the fields of social science and education, this book also explores personal interviews and previously-unseen archival materials. Yielding significant insights on British children's literature of the period, this book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the fields of children's and working-class literature and of British popular culture.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• Children’s Book Publishing and the Working-Class Culture
• 2 Class Culture and Children’s Book Publishing: Leila Berg’s Nippers and Aidan Chambers’ Topliner
• 3 Bad Language or Working-Class Language: Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners
• Scholarship Boy Experiences in Children’s Books
• 4 Education and Uncertainty in Aidan Chamber’s Dance on My Grave
• 5 Aidan Chambers’ Breaktime: Class, Anxiety and Home
• 6 Alan Garner’s Red Shift: The Anger of the Scholarship Boy
• Children’s Book Criticism and Scholarship Boys
• 7 Class and Children’s Book Criticism
• 8 The Conclusion of The Owl Service: Critical Ignorance of Class Anger
• 9 Robert Westall’s Fathom Five: The Scholarship Boy and Socialism
• 10 Conclusion: “The Awareness of Standing Between Two Cultures”
• Index