Working-class Characters Research Articles

Interrogating Emotional Labour: Sacrificial Labour and the Ethics of Care in Chan Ho-Kei’s Second Sister

This essay discusses representations of labour within the capitalist system of contemporary Hong Kong as portrayed in Chan Ho-Kei’s Second Sister. It shows how these representations take the forms of what I call sacrificial labour on the one hand, engaged in by working-class characters such as Nga-Yee, the protagonist of the novel; and ‘uncaring’ labour on the other hand, engaged in by N, the complex hacker-investigator at the centre of the novel. The essay compares these representations of labour with Hochschild’s definition of emotional labour in The Managed Heart, and explores how rethinking and re-evaluating the former can also help defamiliarize and interrogate the latter. The essay also argues that the novel highlights the inadequacies of the concept of emotional labour in truly addressing people’s emotional needs, and that it suggests that only labour that comes more from the ‘heart’ (161)—with less ‘management’ than in Hochschild’s model—is adequate for this purpose. This remains a difficult, and perhaps even impossible, task, but is posited as an important ideal to be aware of.

Sugaring Off by Gillian French

Reviewed by: Sugaring Off by Gillian French Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor French, Gillian Sugaring Off. Algonquin, 2022 [352p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781643752709 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781643753348 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 The isolation and general solitude offered by Waits Mountain is a comfort to seventeen-year-old Owl, who was brought to her uncle’s maple sugar farm as a child after her abusive father threw her down the stairs, leaving her partially deaf. The safety she feels on their land and in the surrounding maple trees is rudely shattered when Cody, a brash, arrogant, clearly toxic but also pretty hot guy, shows up to help her uncle with the sugaring season. The timing couldn’t be worse: Owl is fighting with her best friend, struggling with her special tutor’s expectations, and reeling from the arrival of a letter from her father. Still, Owl can’t help but be drawn to Cody, especially when he reveals his own story of childhood abuse, and the two connect over that shared trauma. The past hasn’t yet let Cody move on, however, and when it shows up, Owl and everyone she loves is at risk. As in French’s other books (BCCB Grit, 5/17; The Missing Season, 4/19), she treats her working-class characters with compassion but not preciousness, with a third-person narration that shows the complications of small-town life without exploiting it for drama. Despite a sense of increasing tension as layers of Cody’s story come to light, this is more of a character study of Owl than a suspenseful thriller. Helped and just as often hindered by the well-meaning adults in her life, Owl is making sense of a world that doesn’t entirely feel hers. She’s unsure of her place in the Deaf community as someone who has only lost partial hearing and is unskilled in ASL; her relationship with Cody is lusty but leaves her feeling off-balance, especially when he treats her like a kid; and the possibility of her father’s return reminds her of a childhood reality she’d rather forget. The mystery aspect could have been left out entirely, as Owl makes an eminently relatable and unquestionably compelling center of the story in her own right. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

La escritura fonoautográfica de Rodolfo Walsh: la grabadora y la disputa por la voz obrera en ¿Quién mató a Rosendo?

Most of the literary criticism has pointed out the importance of inscribing the voices of others or giving voice to others in Rodolfo Walsh’s writing. However, the material and technological conditions under which those voices appear in his texts have been scarcely addressed. In this essay I delve into sound studies to explore the uses of the tape recorder in the writing of ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (1969). I propose the notion of a phonoautographic writing to refer to a textual practice conceived as a transcription of voices. The article analyzes the phonoautographic writing in ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? and explores how the tape recorder allowed Walsh to incorporate and manipulate the voices of his working-class characters. My argument is that Walsh used the tape recorder to register the workers’ voices in order to rearticulate in a personal way the sonic legacy of Peronism in the late 60s, a moment of crisis in the representation of the Argentine labor movement.

Signs of the Inhuman: Hauntings and Lost Futures in Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s <em>La Compañía</em>

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as tools for climate justice and remediation. Taking the example of the critically acclaimed book La compañía (2019), by Mexico’s Verónica Gerber Bicecci, this article deploys a material analysis to evaluate the political implications of its strategy of appropriation of previously existing materials, the periodization it chooses and its haunting significance in Mexican history, and the expression of the inhuman nature it bestows on its working-class characters. The article ends with a series of observations towards a further theorization of the inhuman as an epochal figure evoked in this and other works of eco fiction.

Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys’ Adventure Novel, by Michelle Elleray

Reviewed by: Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys' Adventure Novel by Michelle Elleray Melissa Free (bio) Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys' Adventure Novel, by Michelle Elleray. London and New York: Routledge, 2020, $160.00, $41.60 ebook. The primary subject of Michelle Elleray's Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys' Adventure Novel is the mid-nineteenth-century boys' adventure novel set in the South Pacific. But, like "minute coral polyps," living organisms that "in building a coral structure" make recognizable "the barely visible," Elleray's generic focus brings more to the surface. "Collating pervasive but apparently small and minor references—to the formation of coral islands, the British child's missionary fundraising, the pious sailor, and the Pacific Islander Christian"—Elleray makes "visible the latent connections between missionary culture" and a popular, if specialized, literary genre (166). Elleray contends that not only was "awareness of the South Pacific and its missionary links … assumed knowledge for the mid-Victorian reader," but also that Victorians were fascinated by coral polyps (30). The subject of both scientific investigation and popular discourse, coral polyps signified "the accretive possibilities of small acts" (46), "the generative capacity of the ordinary individual" (39), "the value of work in the service of a greater [social] good" (43), and "God's divine order" (42). Mobilized by evangelicals in juvenile missionary periodicals and mid-century boys' adventure fiction set in the South Pacific, the cultural narrative of the coral polyp "enable[d] agency to be transposed to the child, the working-class sailor, [and] the Pacific Islander convert." This agency, however, was "constrain[ed] … to approved goals through the operations of adult supervision, class authority, and imperial control" (167). Elleray's interesting if overdetermined analogy between the coral polyp and the "socially marginal" organizes her reading of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine (1844–87), published by the London Missionary Society (LMS), and fiction by Frederick Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne, W. H. G. Kingston, and Robert Louis Stevenson (3). Her chapters consistently and smoothly build on each other. In addition to developing material in her introduction, chapter 1 demonstrates the ways in which the LMS established an "affective connection" between the child reader and the Pacific Islander (53); encouraged the child's investment in the sailor's spiritual welfare; and "enjoin[ed]" the child's "spiritual self-reflection" (58), since salvation was not "inherent in … ethnicity or nationality" (61). Marryat does these things as well, we learn in chapter 2, which explores evangelical mobilizations of "the globally mobile sailor" to better understand his importance in Masterman Ready (1841) (68). As the subject of evangelical outreach known as the Seaman's Cause, the sailor played an important role in the South Pacific. His "state of grace (or not) often formed Pacific Islanders' first interactions with Westerners, and [End Page 320] thus the perceived value (or not) of Christianity" (75). Though her focus is on Ready, Elleray notes that he is "led … to Christianity" by another sailor (82) and that a formerly enslaved African woman now working as a servant "transition[s] from nominal Christian to a person of deep and abiding faith" (90). From these working-class characters, the middle-class Seagraves learn "submission to God's will," which validates their position as "the appropriate administrators of imperial rule" (93). While this line of argument is convincing, Elleray's claim that the text "attempts the management of class tensions within Britain" that manifest in Chartism is less well developed (68). The "spiritual status of the working-class sailor" is also an important theme of chapters 3 and 4 (131). Reading Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857) alongside "British documentary accounts of … Pacific Islander missionaries" and juvenile missionary periodicals, chapter 3 focuses on the often-overlooked second half of the novel (102). There, "the teacher," a Pacific Islander convert, "offers a model of muscular Christianity" (111), while Bloody Bill and his compeers illustrate "piratical savagery" (105). "The message" for the novel's "British sailor boys" and its "British child reader[s]" (115) alike is that "physical activity" must be balanced with "spiritual contemplation" (129), "humankind's propensity towards violence" must be managed "through a...

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: Seven-Eleven and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: <i>Seven-Eleven</i> and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

“Tangled Passions”: Realism and Lyricism in the Plays of Peter Gill

This article argues that the work of Welsh theatre director and playwright Peter Gill occupies a unique place in post-1960s’ British playwriting. It explores Gill’s plays as – using theatre critic Susannah Clapp’s phrase – the “missing link” between kitchen-sink realism and more self-consciously poetic forms of theatre text. Gill’s plays make an important contribution to the history of working-class representation in UK theatre for three main reasons: first, the centrality he gives to Wales, Welsh working-class characters, and the city of Cardiff; second, his emphasis on the experience of women, especially mothers; and third, his focus on young male characters expressing and exploring the complexities of same-sex desire. The plays make advances in terms of realist dialogue and structure while also experimenting with layout, repetition, fragmentation, poetic description, and monologue narration. Gill’s work realistically documents the impact of poverty, cramped housing conditions, and social deprivation on his characters as part of a political project to show the lives of Welsh working-class people on stage. While doing so, Gill innovates in his handling of time, perspective, viewpoint, and genre. His plays occupy a distinctive place in the history of British, working-class, gay theatre, helping us to rethink what each of these three key terms means.

Lesbian Identity and “Personal Dishonesty” in Lorraine Hansberry’s “Flowers for the General”

ABSTRACT Misconceptions and myths that surround Hansberry and her most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), are examined through a close reading of an unpublished play from Lorraine Hansberry’s archived papers, “Flowers for the General” (1955). In this play, Hansberry articulates lesbian identity fully in the character Marcia. The play’s major themes of the importance of upholding sociopolitical beliefs, the possibility of a sustainable lesbian identity, and the commonalities between the lesbian, Jewish, African American, and working-class characters combine to create a significant statement at an early point in Hansberry’s career. Various cultural, social, and political obstacles prevented Hansberry’s writing on sexuality—which anticipates current critical conceptions of female sexuality, same-sex relationships, and homosocial bonds—from being published or staged. However, examination of archival materials such as “Flowers for the General” is a necessary step in expanding the view of Hansberry’s complex and contradictory life and work outside of A Raisin in the Sun.

The construction of (white) working-class identity in narrative literary texts and its contribution to socio-cultural and politico-financial inequality

ABSTRACT Using Fredric Jameson’s theory of the ideologeme to trace representations of working- and white working-class characters through a selection of contemporary literary texts, this article shows how the construction of (white) working-class identity in literature has been influenced by, and fed back into, mainstream representations of the (white) working class in politics and media, thus contributing to cycles of socio-cultural, financial and political exclusion. This article continues by arguing that there is a lack of rounded and developed white working-class characters in British fiction, specifically in London and the South-East, and that contemporary authors continue to rely on typified representations rather than interrogate them, therefore remaining complicit in feedback loops that work to marginalise the (white) working class. To conclude, an argument is put forward in support of opening up space in the public arena for both imagined and real individual voices from marginalised groups to be heard, providing more direct access to channels of representation and an interrogation of the blame narratives that are used to maintain these groups’ socio-economic and political exclusion.

The Painter of Rural Life: Narrative Complexity and Imaginative Sympathy in George Sand and George Eliot

This article explores the concept of liminal homodiegeticity in George Sand’s La mare au diable (1846) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). Both authors use the brief, chronologically distanced incursion of the novel’s narrator into the storyworld to embody an ethics of sympathy. By portraying rural, working-class characters whose lives are valorized through the narrator’s reconstruction of their stories from later conversation, Sand and Eliot aimed to shift public opinion toward expanded sympathy for their real-world counterparts. The distinctive, complex narrative process involved reveals the importance of modeling sympathy in Sand’s and Eliot’s aesthetics. Both narrators appear in sections of the novels that are structurally liminal: in the case of La mare au diable, the first two chapters and the appendix; in that of Adam Bede, the much-discussed chapter 17. The self-conscious marginalization of the embodied narrator’s role tests the limits of the distinction between homo- and heterodiegeticity in narratology from Genette to more recent work by Wolf Schmid. The oblique insertion of the narrator implies that the ethics of sympathy rely on a logically implausible plenitude of narrativization. As a result, the reader is urged toward an equal measure of sympathy for the narrator as for the rural characters they describe.

“Earn It with the Sweat of My Brow”: Essential Labor and Survival in The Blithedale Romance

Abstract “Earn It with the Sweat of My Brow”: Essential Labor and Survival in The Blithedale Romance focuses on the dynamics of class struggle and essential labor within the utopian community in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance. The article argues that at the center of all of the novel's failure and tragedy is a negotiation of labor and class. Informed by the coronavirus pandemic, the article focuses on instances in the novel wherein Miles Coverdale, the narrator, filters his viewpoint of labor on the farm through the lens of a “mist of fever.” In this mist of fever, Coverdale is able to acknowledge his own lack of commitment to labor on the farm as well as his reinforcement of class struggle through a degradation of working-class characters such as Silas Foster. The article is informed by a close reading that attends to the instances in which Coverdale withdraws from labor and deploys his clairvoyant vision; thus, the performative nature of labor on the farm is thrown into stark relief and Coverdale's own lack of commitment is revealed.

All in a day's work: Working-class heroes as videogame protagonists

Abstract Class depictions in videogames are prevalent, yet understudied. In this article, we analyse how the working class – particularly working-class men – have been depicted in videogames over the past 30 years. In doing so, we bring together a class- and gender-based analysis to study how narratives, representations, gameplay, and game systems construct the “working-class hero” as a central protagonist. This is done by examining eight paired examples of videogames that feature working-class characters in central roles, including janitor, fire-fighter, taxi driver, and bartender. Our analysis finds that some roles are glorified (such as firefighters), positioning their protagonists in direct conflict with white-collar settings and antagonists. However, many other roles task players with “doing their job” in the face of repetitive (and sometimes outlandish) working conditions. Through these examples, we document the portrayal of working-class videogame heroes, noting how videogames can both reinforce and subvert common media tropes.

Umstrittene Stadt: Das Wienbild Veza Canettis

Vienna is the location for most of Veza Canetti's stories and plays but, just as in the Viennese works of her husband Elias Canetti, it is rarely if at all mentioned by name, a literary technique which underscores the city's intimidating presence. City landmarks restrict the behaviour of her working-class characters who feel themselves excluded. They have often moved to Vienna from elsewhere and are not properly accepted. Motifs of arrival and departure occur so frequently in her writing. Even the violent behaviour of Herr Iger in Der Oger can be explained by his insecure status. After the Workers’ Uprising of February 1934 Vienna becomes a tabu subject. Only in exile after 1938 does she once again address the city of her birth which has now become enemy territory. *

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh Christa DiMarco (bio) Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him Mariella Guzzoni University of Chicago Press https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo51205258.html224 Pages; Print, $25.00 Vincent van Gogh’s reading practice is as legendary as his paintings. While he devoted his days to his canvases, at night he would “light the lamp and go on reading.” In his letters (of which we have over 800), he devoted many passages to discussing literature from Shakespeare to popular periodicals and modern novels. Reading Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Émile Zola as well as French historical studies by Jules Michelet, cultural criticism by Thomas Carlyle, and studying printed illustrations by Frédéric Montenard, Hubert von Herkomer, and George Cruikshank laid the thematic and stylistic foundation for his art. Van Gogh, for example, noted that he sympathized with Madame François and Florent, two working-class characters who attempt to navigate bourgeois Paris in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873). Prints that depicted those who lived on the economic or geographic margins likewise captured his attention. In a letter to the artist Anthon van Rappard, Van Gogh shared one of his important artistic influences: The Graphic, a British illustrated publication from which he saved prints to “form a kind of Bible for an artist, in which he reads now and again to get into a mood.” Among the many prints he mentioned, Van Gogh compared George John Pinwell’s The Sisters “to the full song of the nightingale on a spring night” and regularly touted the quality and the impact of the prints he came across. Both the novels he read and the prints he cherished conveyed the dignity of a humble life amid inescapable societal difficulties, a central theme he explored in the imagery of his short, ten-year painting career. Despite the fluency between the written word and painting, we seldom recognize the literary imprint that permeates Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Even art historians pay relatively scant attention to the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of his artistic approach. Cursory references to Van Gogh’s reading habits abound in biographical accounts and exhibition catalogs, and just two scholarly explorations come to mind: Judy Sund’s 1992 True to Temperament: Van Gogh and French Naturalist Literature and Wouter van der Veen’s 2009 Vincent van Gogh: A Literary Mind. Given that Van Gogh mentioned over two-hundred authors in his letters and read in Dutch, English, French, and German, surely there is more to explore. Mariella Guzzoni’s Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him offers newfound connections between Van Gogh’s paintings and his insatiable literary curiosity that will be of interest to Van Gogh enthusiasts and bibliophiles. Finding a worthwhile approach to Van Gogh’s large body of work — over 800 paintings and 1000 works on paper — requires a method as innovative as the paintings themselves. Guzzoni uses the extensive collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as well as her own collection of the editions Van Gogh read and discussed in his letters. She leads readers chronologically through Van Gogh’s works without becoming entangled in the myriad facts of the painter’s biography, a temptation few authors navigate well. Instead, she explores specific references and stops to rest on telling exchanges between text and art that the book’s engaging layout complements. Vincent’s Books is a beautiful publication that pays homage to the art of the book. It is carefully structured, poignantly designed, and includes full-color matte reproductions of journal pages and book covers. Reproductions of the editions Van Gogh read appear throughout and Guzzoni also includes pictures of the books open to the passages she discusses so you can view the print in its original publication. These pictures appear alongside Van Gogh’s paintings, drawings, or letters and are often accompanied by germane quotations. Readers can pause on passages dedicated to reflecting on the interplay between text and image, an experience akin to spending time with a rare edition in an archive...

Race Thinking in Margaret Cavendish's Drama

Abstract: This essay uses an intersectional approach to identify in the drama of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the patterns that Hannah Arendt called "race thinking" and to extend Arendt's approach backwards in time as early as the seventeenth century. Famously, Cavendish—poet, playwright, personality—prided herself on her "singularity" or originality, from her cultivated eccentricity of dress to her insistence, which anticipates the Romantic movement, that her works come from her alone (down to her punctilious annotation of the occasional lines or stanzas or scenes composed by her husband and included in her plays). The combined authority Cavendish appropriates—rank and individual merit—and that she uses to transcend the restrictions placed on her by her gender makes Cavendish an apt instance through which to investigate how or whether merit and rank—and gender—can produce race thinking. I suggest that Cavendish's first play, the two-part Loves Adventures , simultaneously queers or questions heteronormative reproduction and the purity of an imagined bloodline or race and yet restricts the ability to transcend race (understood for Cavendish as bloodline and as gender) to those who can demonstrate merit or (to borrow Patricia Akhimie's invaluable formulation) "cultivation." Similarly, Cavendish's later play The Bridals uses crossor transgender casting and the potential for cultivation not to liberate but to humiliate and racialize its working-class characters. In The Female Academy , wealthy, aristocratic ladies literally become the gatekeepers and guarantors of education and bloodline. The intersectional hierarchies of rank, skin color, gender, and sexual autonomy thus triumph over an imagined innate or even a "cultivated" merit or virtue.

‘You know all them things’: Nostalgia, Idealization, and Speech in Working-Class Poems by Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton

This essay examines nostalgia, idealization, and speech in poems from the latter half of the twentieth century in the US and the UK that convey working-class experience, identifying nostalgia as a binding feature of such poems and tracing it to the 18th -century ‘nostalgia poem.’ I will first establish briefly how nostalgia in poems by Philip Levine, James Wright, and Robert Hayden results in idealizations that resist sentimentality and then demonstrate that the various forms of local speech employed in some other post1945 poems about working-class life by Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton act as a stay against such idealization, effectively transforming them into more explicitly anticlassist –and, in the case of Brooks and Clifton, antiracist and antisexist –forms of social critique and defiance. Their poems interrupt and complicate the idealization of the familiar working-class surroundings they seek to reenter, familiar and familial realms that are not just temporal and spatial but linguistic. They honor their characters’ fortitude in the face of working-class encumbrances not by idealizing them but by concentrating on their working-class characters’ linguistic origins. Manifestations of local speech in these nostalgic poems amount to a poetic resource that disrupts idealizations of working-class experience, critiquing, in that process, classism and, in Brooks and Clifton, revealing classism’s intersections with racism and sexism. These poems don’t just desire to go back to earlier worlds but do go back linguistically to working-class, nonstandard languages – their particular forms of original local speech–that refuse the conditions that would subordinate those languages and the people who speak them.

Social Mobility in James Kelman’s A Disaffection

تهدف هذه الدراسة الى البحث في إعادة تمثيل كيلمان الثقافي والغير التقليدي لهوية الفرد الاسكتلندي المنتمي للطبقة العاملة وتجسيد الحياة اليومية التي يعيشها في اسكتلندا ما بعد الصناعة. استنادًا إلى الطابع الفرداني الذي يضفيه الروائي الى شخصياته، توكد الدراسة على أن في عصر ما بعد الصناعة لا تزال المجتمعات المعاصرة مثل غلاسكو تعاني من الانقسام الطبقي والتفكك الثقافي، وان مفهوم المجتمع اللّا طبقي أو العقلية اللاطبقية في القرن الحادي والعشرين لم يتحقق بعد. &#x0D; تناقش هذه الدراسه رواية كيلمان ، سخط (۸۹ ۱۹) ، مسلطا الضوء على شخصية باتريك ، وهو مدرس منتمي الى الطبقة العاملة يعيش بمرارة واغتراب . يثيرالفصل تساؤلات حول دور التعليم في الحراك الاجتماعي ، وقضايا الانعزال الثقافي والطبقي التي تشكل عاملاً رئيسياً في إعادة بناء او هدم هوية الطبقة العاملة.

Class, Culture, and Killing

In the final volume of a trilogy about the concept of culture and its relation to politics, Francis Mulhern defines a new genre, the condition of culture novel, and traces it from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and E. M. Forster’s Howards End to Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, reading off from it middleclass anxieties about the rise of the working-class movement. What does it mean about the novel or about the working-class movement itself that so many working-class characters are killed off by their aspiration to culture or are presented as murderers of their so-called superiors? Is the aspiration itself fundamentally flawed, or is the flaw in the novels? Mulhern’s persuasive allegorical readings can be read as a fascinating application of the Greimasian semiotic square as well as a renewal of Mulhern’s epic debate with the intellectual historian Stefan Collini, in the pages of New Left Review, over the proper relation between culture and politics.

Another London, another point of view: the use of defamiliarisation to elicit empathy in the reader for the white working-class protagonist in Another London and their ‘real-world’ equivalents

ABSTRACT In literary fiction, white working-class characters are often represented as part of a homogenised group, complete with stereotypical behaviours and characteristics. Using Fredric Jameson's theory of the ideologeme to identify representational tropes of white working-class characters, this article analyses the juxtaposition of free-indirect discourse and first-person narration in Another London as a defamiliarisation technique to expose the ideologemes of white working-class literary representation. It then examines how, using practice-based research methodologies, the novel attempts to elicit empathy in the reader for the protagonist – an individuated white working-class character – and by doing so challenge the reader's assumptions about the lifestyles of members of this group. The reader's literary experience can translate into ‘real-world’ changes in their perception of, and assumptions about, the behaviours and lifestyles of members of the white working class, thereby challenging stereotypical representations in mainstream media and politics, as well as literature. Another London is a novel written as the creative component of a Ph.D. Creative Writing. Set on a council estate in East London, it follows the social and psychological development of a white working-class boy into adulthood as he lives through fictionalised parallels of real-life events, which force him to confront his own ethnic and class identity.

‘Ay, ay, divil, all’s raight! We’ve smashed ’em!’: Translating Violence and ‘Yorkshire Roughness’ in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley

By taking Yorkshire Luddism as Shirley’s (1849) framework, Charlotte Brontë places political violence at the centre of its narrative. Despite this, much of the novel’s inclusions of violence are largely undescribed and even unwitnessed, often displaced to another site, such as a letter or nameless voice. When politically motivated attacks committed by working-class characters are represented, these moments are mediated by an upper-middle-class spectator or translator. This paper seeks to identify and explore the presence and significance of politically motivated violence in the novel, emphasizing its centrality within the text and highlighting its connection with nineteenth-century attitudes to issues of regional dialect, the legitimacy of force and ‘Yorkshire roughness’.