Working-class Writers Research Articles

Stig Sjödin och minnets politik

The aim of this article is to analyse the attitudes to history and memory expressed in the working-class poetry of Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) – both in Sotfratgment (Fragments of Soot) from 1949, which marked his breakthrough as a poet, and in the poetry he wrote for the labour movement (mainly poems published in tradeunion membership magazines or read at meetings and congresses) – and to discuss how he and his poetry are today viewed as reminders of political ideals and experiences threatened by oblivion. There are certain differences between how memory and remembering is treated in Sotfragment and in Sjödin’s labour-movement poetry respectively. In Sotfragment, focus is more often on individual memories and existential problems, whereas in the labour-movement poetry, Sjödin is sometimes more explicitly political and writes about collective memories from a proletarian perspective. These differences are conditioned by differences between the spheres to which the poems belong: that of literature and that of the labour movement. In connection with the rise of left-wing radicalism in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s, Sjödin argued that older working-class literature contained important political experiences and perspectives. This is also how his works are sometimes viewed today, both by working-class writers and by political commentators. Thereby, it is emphasized that literature is not a passive medium for the preservation of memories, but that it can also transform them and make them politically relevant.

Kroppsminne och kollektiv erfarenhet: Objektiveringens betydelse för produktionen av arbetarlitteraritet

Literature is the memory of a culture: whether included in the canon or not, it testifies to conceptions, mentalities, and conditions in its time. Working-class literature is a young literary type, that for long was excluded from the canon and recognized literary tradition, and therefore has a special relationship to memory, experience, and culture. The first Swedish working-class writers were self-taught, without access to the bourgeois cultural heritage. They were workers, writing about workers, for workers and addressing the class collective. But they were also individuals, who started from their own memories and experiences. How did they go about making their own thing a matter for the whole class? How did they integrate the personal into a collective memory culture? That is the main issue in my article. The task is to shed light on the relationship between individual experience and collective memory in the first generation of Swedish working-class prose around 1910.I will dive into this subject matter by employing the notion of literary objectification, understood as creating vivid images, scenes, and situations from personal memories and experiences serving as an objective correlate (T.S. Eliot). The function of this correlate is to evoke recognition at a distance in the implied reader: an alienated recognition (Viktor Shklovsky), or a kind of sustained Verfremdung (Bertolt Brecht), which also includes contemplation and reflection. A working objective correlate, as I understand it here, must be based on some form of collective memory. I want to develop this idea with the support of memory studies, specifically, works by cultural researcher Jan Assmann and phenomenologist Thomas Fuchs.
 The reasoning will then be tested on some text examples from the working-class authors Dan Andersson (1888–1920), Maria Sandel (1870–1927), and Karl Östman (1876–1953). In particular, I will dwell on depictions of physical labour, the body memories that are objectified, and the extent to which such objectification produces a special proletarian literariness.

Precarity and Class Consciousness in Contemporary Swedish Working-Class Literature

This article analyses aesthetical–political strategies for the promotion of class consciousness among workers in a few examples of contemporary Swedish working-class literature from different genres that describe and criticize precarious working conditions. Special attention is given to how these texts engage in dialogue with the notion of the precariat and to the authors’ use of decidedly literary forms. One important result is that Swedish working-class writers highlight the heterogeneity among those working under precarious conditions while also arguing that they share certain economic conditions, both amongst each other and with members of other groups (especially the traditional working class). Furthermore, it is argued that the use of literary forms (as opposed to, e.g., reportage or documentary) reflects the absence in the precariat of class consciousness, and the authors’ belief that literature can contribute to the creation of such a consciousness.

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

Addressing the Machine: Victorian Working-Class Poetry and Industrial Machinery

Abstract This article explores the representation of machinery by industrial workers in the Victorian period, and argues that their writings have a qualitatively different literary approach to machinery than that found in the work of established Victorian authors. It uses little-known poems by Scottish and Northern working-class writers to investigate how they use language and form to reflect upon the place of machinery in their working lives.

Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy, by Emma Griffin

Reviewed by: Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy by Emma Griffin Sarah Winter (bio) Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy, by Emma Griffin; pp. v + 389. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020, $35.00, £20.00. Emma Griffin's Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy tracks the impact of the male breadwinner wage on the economic and emotional lives of Victorian and Edwardian British working-class families through a multifaceted analysis of 662 working-class autobiographies (443 written by men, and the rest by women), some published but many existing exclusively in archives or as recorded interviews. Griffin notes that the proportion of male and female autobiographers evened out among those born after 1890 (9–10). Revising her account of the Industrial Revolution's positive effects on male workers' personal freedom and economic opportunity in Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution (2013) through a focus on gender inequality, Bread Winner also expands Griffin's research on autobiographies to understand working-class Britons' economic lives in ways that quantitative methods cannot fully capture. She observes that, while working-class autobiographies have been intensively studied, they have not been used "to understand 'big' problems like the extent and meaning of economic growth" in the nineteenth century, or why this growth failed to eliminate widespread poverty (296). Griffin interprets the male breadwinner wage—"a bargaining concept that was successfully deployed by several campaigners and trade unions throughout the [nineteenth] century" (4)—as an ideology that disqualified women from entering the labor market; as a gendered structural element of the economy; and as a narrative scaffolding for working-class writers to organize their retrospective stories and assess the financial successes or struggles of their families (229). Bread Winner is constructive for its use of personal narratives as historical evidence that can generate new interdisciplinary methods of interpretation in economic history. The book's chapters study the structural effects of the breadwinner wage through a range of topics derived through close analysis of the autobiographies, including women's and girls' lifelong "drudgery" at housework and their restricted opportunities for employment outside the home due to lack of skills (86); the reinforcement of masculinity, agency, and financial independence gained by men and boys through work; the resulting family dynamics in which a working boy contributing income was "somebody" (82), while girls were "nobodies" (83); hunger and the distribution of food within the household by gender and work status, and in urban and industrial versus rural areas; autobiographers' judgments of their fathers as breadwinners and their mothers as caregivers and household managers; writers' reflections on their family's emotional life; changes over time in the autobiographical format and in writers' attitudes toward gender and self-expression; and men's growing access to political participation and citizenship versus women's mostly muted public lives. By extrapolating from her sources, Griffin shows how rising male wages in urban, industrialized areas limited wage growth for women, thus intensifying the economic gender inequality produced by the breadwinner model. These developments made women dependent on a male wage and reinforced a domestic power dynamic that maintained their social subordination. Griffin also adopts as an analytical tool the autobiographers' own benchmark of provision, used to evaluate their fathers as successful or inadequate breadwinners (110). [End Page 528] She highlights that almost half of the autobiographers' families lacked a reliable breadwinner (153). As many recounted, when fathers abandoned the family, became ill or disabled by work, or succumbed to alcoholism, mothers or wives who entered the workforce were often unable to earn a living wage and were still responsible for housework and childcare. The wage differential facilitated by the male breadwinner model also served as a gendered "form of control" within the family. For girls who hoped to attain secondary schooling but were retained by their parents at home to help with housework, "low female wages were thus an important structural element of society, playing a vital role in ensuring that all families had access to the unpaid domestic work that they required in order to function" (58). The autobiographies also provide Griffin with convincing evidence for a...

Cosmopolitanism and the Scottish Working-Class Writer: John Parkinson/Yehya-en-Nasr and Islam in Ayrshire

Explores the grassroots cosmopolitan and international literary interests of Scottish working-class writers, through the writing of the Scottish poet and convert to Islam John Parkinson or "Yehya-en-Nasr" (1874-1918), in the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald, in the monthly The Islamic World and the weekly newspaper The Crescent, as a journalist in Rangoon, and in book form, notably his Lays of Love and War (Ardrossan, n.d.), arguing that Parkinson's "Muslim cosmopolitanism" and his local Ayrshire identity and contexts were inextricably intertwined.

Them and Uz: Harrison and me

The working-class writer, having moved into a middle-class dominated field, often feels alienated from their old and new cultures – separated as they are from their heritage and not quite grounded in the new elite circle. The markers of working-class culture are much harder to define in our hyper-modern situation, and this exacerbates the alienation. This position opens up possibilities in perception and expression from those in the margins and off-kilter positions. Tracing the multivoiced qualities of Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ and R. M. Francis’s poetics, alongside biographical and autobiographical details, this hybrid article argues that off-kilter and outcast voices, like those in the aforementioned class liminality, are in the best place to explore and discuss the difficult to navigate cultures, communities and identities. This fusion of personal essay, poetry and literary criticism considers the unusual, marginal and liminal positioning of working-class writers, researchers and academics.

World Citizenship in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Juvenilia

World Citizenship in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Juvenilia

Romantic Wales and the Imperial Picturesque

AbstractThis essay argues that the aesthetic category named the picturesque was first systematized in a Welsh colonial context and that picturesque looking always reflects, to some degree, its initially imperialist function. While the picturesque rapidly acceded to a preeminent place in British travel and landscape writing, its rise was contested by Welsh and working-class writers like the antiquarian poet Richard Llwyd (1752–1835). By conspicuously failing to impose picturesque features on a carefully historicized landscape, Llwyd’s poem Beaumaris Bay (1800) lays bare the picturesque’s antihistorical drive to eradicate local difference. Renewed critical attention to early attempts to establish an antipicturesque aesthetic may uncover important precursors to present-day postcolonial and transnational theory, precursors that can enrich the ongoing global turn in literary history.

De Waal, Kit, ed. (2019) Common People: an Anthology of Working Class Writers, Unbound, London, UK. Connolly, Nathan, ed. (2017) Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class, Dead Ink, St Ives, UK.

de Waal, Kit, ed. (2019) Common People: an Anthology of Working Class Writers, Unbound, London, UK. Connolly, Nathan, ed. (2017) Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class, Dead Ink, St Ives, UK.

<i>Stray dogs: Interviews with working-class writers</i>, edited by Daniel M. Mendoza

Stray dogs: Interviews with working-class writers edited by Daniel M. Mendoza. (Down & Out Books: Lutz, Fl., 2016), 147 pages. $6.99 (eBook)

”Strängt taget fattas oss ingenting”: Folkhemmet i Stig Sjödins och Jenny Wrangborgs arbetarlyrik

Abstract The aim of this article is to analyze the attitudes of two prominent Swedish working-class poets – Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) and Jenny Wrangborg (born 1984) – toward the social-democratic welfare state. The premise of the analysis is that this welfare state is a historical and changing phenomenon that has attracted attention from working-class writers in different ways at different times. Sjödin wrote during the emergence and the heyday of the social-democratic welfare state, whereas Wrangborg is writing poetry at a time when the labour movement is ailing and the welfare state challenged. Thus, despite the two poets having closely aligned aesthetical and ideological ideals, their attitudes toward the welfare state are distinctly different.

An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, by Gregory Vargo

Reviewed by: An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel by Gregory Vargo Chris R. Vanden Bossche (bio) An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, by Gregory Vargo; pp. xiv + 278. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $99.99. The rising of the middle class has loomed so largely in studies of Victorian literature that the study of class itself, especially the working classes, long received scant attention. What criticism we have has often focused on representations of class, primarily in what is deemed middle-class literature. Fortunately, scholars such as Louis James and Martha Vicinus have introduced Victorianists to working-class literature, and the modern editions of Ian Haywood and others have made it widely available. The result has been a growing body of critical literature to which Gregory Vargo's An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel is a valuable new addition. Vargo's book makes two interventions that build on and extend important developments in recent criticism on Chartist writing. First, rather than measuring Chartist writing in terms of assumptions about what it should envision—a fault of some early criticism of this work—it treats this work as a form of social action and asks what it attempts to achieve on its own terms. Second, it does not treat this work in isolation but instead examines the ways in which working-class and middle-class writing respond to, adapt, and revise each other. Among the first books to take this approach were Sally Ledger's Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007) and Sambudha Sen's London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic (2012), both of which investigated the ways that Charles Dickens's novels engaged with and borrowed from radical literature and discourse. The project of these studies, as I take it, is to treat ideological formation not as the dissemination of a predetermined set of doctrines but as a process that novelists engage in as they seek to come to terms with their social condition. My own Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867 (2014) applied a similar approach to other middle-class authors while also investigating movement in the other direction by examining [End Page 469] writing produced by radicals and members of the working classes. Vargo's Underground History shifts the focus even further toward radical literature. While there are discussions of Harriet Martineau, Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, he digs deeper into the archive and devotes more space to radical literature with analyses of William Cobbett, Thomas Cooper, Thomas Martin Wheeler, Ernest Jones, and others as well as non-literary texts from the radical press such as The Book of Murder (1839) and commentary on empire and post-1848 refugees in the Chartist press. Vargo's concern is not only to examine middle-class novelists' engagement with radicalism, but also radical fiction's engagement with middle-class discourse and narrative conventions. In particular, he examines the ways in which Chartist fictions rewrite the narrative conventions of melodrama and the Bildungsroman. Whereas the middle-class forms of these genres locate agency in the individual—in particular the melodramatic villain as the source of evil and the self-making individual of the Bildungsroman—Chartist fiction focuses on the social order itself. The villains of Chartist melodrama are no longer aristocratic rakes but institutions such as the marketplace or the patriarchal family. Vargo's analysis of the ways in which working-class writers and radicals shifted the locus of social evil from individuals to the social system is insightful, but also fits a familiar paradigm. Indeed, while he suggests in passing that Dickens "typically traces crises to the wrongdoing of specific characters," citing the example of Merdle in Little Dorrit (1855–57), many would argue that by the time of his late novels Dickens had himself shifted toward a systemic, rather than individualistic, conception of social evil, villainy in Little Dorrit residing not in Merdle but in the institutions the banker represents and their corollary in the Circumlocution...

The Birth of the Militant Self

The 1905 Revolution was often considered by workers writing memoirs as the most important event in their lives. This paper examines biographical reminiscences of the political participation of working-class militants in the 1905 Revolution. I scrutinize four tropes used by working-class writers to describe their life stories narrated around their political identity. These are: (1) overcoming misery and destitution, (2) autodidacticism, (3) political initiation, and (4) feeling of belonging to the community of equals. All four demonstrate that the militant self cannot be understood in separation from the life context of the mobilized workers. Participation in party politics was an important factor modifying the life course of workers in the direction resonating with their aspirations and longings. The argument is informed by analysis of over a hundred of biographical testimonies written by militants from various political parties in different political circumstances.

Working to Pay for a Room of One's Own: Modern Women Writers in Latin America

This article examines the material conditions necessary for literary production in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Latin America from the perspective of two working-class writers. Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) and Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) contributed to shaping the modern idea of the professional writer and public intellectual in the 1920s and 1930s. These two Latin American writers reflected on the social, economic, and personal conditions required for writing as well as the costs, particularly for working-class women who chose to resist traditional gender roles. Their ideas can be placed in dialogue with Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own to reveal the extent to which these women from different sides of the Atlantic all identified the need for space, time, and money to write. Nevertheless, there were some significant differences in putting their principles into practice, particularly for women whose income depended on employment. Their paid work played a central but ambivalent role in shaping their identities. While it threatened their time to read and write, it was crucial to their autonomy and public personas.

‘Ping Ping Ping / I break things’: Productive Disruption in the WorkingClass Poetry of Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman

This essay explores how working-class lives are represented in the poetry of three American women poets, Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman. It discusses how the poets’ working-class backgrounds affect their poetics and their perceptions of poetic craft. Through analysis, I show how their poetry shares a sense of defiant resistance, communicated through imagery of violence, labor, and sexual pleasure, responding to societal and institutional limitations placed on working-class women and working-class women writers.

빅토리아 시대 맨체스터와 문학 공동체

Victorian Manchester is admittedly identified as the ur-scene of industrialization and urbanization during the Industrial Revolution since Engels’s appalling description of the city. Engels’s influence on studies of nineteenth-century Manchester is still pervasive, yet this overriding image of Manchester as the typical industrial town might not fully represent the cultural capacity of the city considering the emergence of working-class literary culture and poetic community in the early Victorian age. Based on Raymond Williams’s analysis of culture of England during the 1840s in The Long Revolution, this paper expands the object of analysis into the works of self-taught artisan poets and their literary culture. Aside from the famous industrial fictions of Elizabeth Gaskell, Manchester had a kind of literary public sphere of working-class writers and printers that could be built into a community of culture. Especially the Manchester Poets, or the Sun Inn group of the late 1830s and early 1840s formed their own literary community based on local writings and their reciprocal feelings circulated among them. One of the Sun Inn group members John Critchely Prince’s identification of himself as the mediator of cultural reproduction among his own class reveals his belief of the possibility of cultural community. In the conclusion, this paper suggests that future research of female artisan writers will provide the more profound portrait of the city.

The Making of the Finnish Working Class in Early Twentieth-Century Working-Class Literature

Abstract Working-class literature was one of the cultural areas that defined social class in early twentieth-century Finland. As a starting point for this article, it stems from E. P. Thompson's key points: first, the working class was active in its own making, and, second, that class needs to be understood as a relationship between people. In the present article, I consider how the working class is represented and valued in poems, newspaper articles, labor-movement songs, novels, and political leaflets written by Kössi Kaatra, Hilja Pärssinen, and Esa Paavo-Kallio—three working-class writers in whose works we witness the various discourses on class as well as the different genres of working-class writing. As I will show here, the representations of the working class created by these writers are in conflict with the hegemonic discourses on class, and these representations are produced through processes that include gender and nationality.

“Nor Happiness, nor Majesty, nor Fame”: Proletarian Decadence and International Influence in Early Twentieth-Century Finnish Working-Class Literature

Abstract This article focuses on the complex relationship of socialism, working-class culture, and fin de siècle decadence in early twentieth-century Finnish working-class culture. The hegemonic ideology of the labor movement praised self-discipline and conservative literary ideals, but many working-class people were inspired by the radical writings of August Strindberg and Oscar Wilde. Furthermore, proletarian decadence was related to the pro- and anti-feminist debates, the ideas of free love, and to the construction of a new working-class masculinity. These ideals were the subject of lively discussions in a conversational community of young working-class intellectuals during the First World War. The leading figures of this informal café club—called “The Decameron Club”—were the young poets Kössi Ahmala (1889–1918), Kasperi Tanttu (1886–1918), and Emil Lindahl (1892–1937). Their texts personified “the new masculinity” in the figure of either a working-class bohemian or flâneur. Kasperi Tanttu was a self-educated poet and “a proletarian dandy,” well known in various political and cultural circles. In spite of his limited primary education, Tanttu mediated the traditions of world literature to working-class readers, especially to the younger generation. He admired the poetry of Byron and Shelley, and he translated a few of Shelley's poems into Finnish. The Civil War put an abrupt and violent end to the visions and writings of these young poets, but they have continued to inspire new generations of working-class writers.