A History of British Working Class Literature

John Goodridge, Bridget Keegan

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781107190405
• eBook ISBN: 9781108122108
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 When "Bread Depends on Her Character'': The Problem of Laboring Class Subjectivity in the Foundling Hospital Archive
• 2 "Stirr'd up by Emulation of the Famous Mr. Duck'': Laboring Class Poetry in the 1730s
• 3 The Verse Epistle and Laboring Class Literary Sociability from Duck to Burns
• 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
• 5 Alexander Wilson: The Rise and Fall and Rise of a Laboring Class Writer
• 6 Neither Mute nor Inglorious: Ann Yearsley and Elegy
• 7 "British Bards'': The Concept of Laboring Class Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Wales
• 8 "Behold in These Coromantees / The Fate of an Agonized World'': Edward Rushton's Transnational Radicalism
• 9 Transnational Ulster and Laboring Class Self-Fashioning
• 10 Working Class Poetry and the Royal Literary Fund: Two Case Studies in Patronage
• 11 The Life of William Cobbett: Caricature, Hauntology, and the Impossibility of Radical Life Writing in the Romantic Period
• 12 John Clare's Agrarian Idyll: A Confluence of Pastoral and Georgic
• 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
• 14 "The Guilty Game of Human Subjugation'': Religion as Ideology in Thomas Cooper's The Purgatory of Suicides
• 15 At the Margins of Print: Life Narratives of Victorian Working Class Women
• 16 The Newspaper Press and the Victorian Working Class Poet
• 17 Tensions, Transformations, and Local Identity: The Evolving Meanings of Nineteenth-Century Tyneside Dialect Songs
• 18 On the Road: All Manner of Tramps in English and Scottish Writing from the 1880s to the 1920s
• 19 Ethel Carnie Holdsworth: Genre, Serial Fiction, and Popular Reading Patterns
• 20 "The Young Men of the Nation'': Alexander Baron and Urban Working Class Masculinity
• 21 Kathleen Dayus: The Girl from Hockley
• 22 "It Have a Kind of Communal Feeling with the Working Class and the Spades'': Sam Selvon, Tony Harrison, and "Colonization in Reverse''
• 23 Clannish Confines: The Folk, the Proletariat, and the People in Modern Scottish Literature
• 24 A Critical Minefield: The Haunting of the Welsh Working Class Novel
• 25 Transforming Working Class Writers and Writing: Digital Editions, Projects, and Analyses
• Afterword
• Works Cited
• Index