Download or read book Rethinking Working Class History written by Dipesh Chakrabarty and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dipesh Chakrabarty combines a history of the jute-mill workers of Calcutta with a fresh look at labor history in Marxist scholarship. Opposing a reductionist view of culture and consciousness, he examines the milieu of the jute-mill workers and the way it influenced their capacity for class solidarity and "revolutionary" action from 1890 to 1940. Around and within this empirical core is built his critique of emancipatory narratives and their relationship to such Marxian categories as "capital," "proletariat," or "class consciousness." The book contributes to currently developing theories that connect Marxist historiography, post-structuralist thinking, and the traditions of hermeneutic analysis. Although Chakrabarty deploys Marxian arguments to explain the political practices of the workers he describes, he replaces universalizing Marxist explanations with a sensitive documentary method that stays close to the experience of workers and their European bosses. He finds in their relationship many elements of the landlord/tenant relationship from the rural past: the jute-mill workers of the period were preindividualist in consciousness and thus incapable of participating consistently in modern forms of politics and political organization.
Download or read book Working class Fiction written by Ian Haywood and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first study for more than ten years of this radical genre, covering working class literature over the last 150 years. It argues that working-class fiction has flourished in periods of major social and political change.
Download or read book English Novel Hist 1895 1920 written by David Trotter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1993. Written specifically for students and assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, David Trotter’s The English Novel in History 1895-1920 provides the first detailed and fully comprehensive analysis of early twentieth-century English fiction. Whereas all previous studies have been rigorously selective, Trotter looks at over 140 novelists across the whole spectrum of fiction: from the innovations of Joyce’s Ulysses through to popular mass-market genres such as detective stories and spy-thrillers. By examining the novels in both stylistic and historical terms, David Trotter looks at the ways in which writers responded to contemporary preoccupations such as the spectacle of consumption and the growth of suburbia, or to anxieties about the decline of Empire, racial ‘degeneration’ and ‘sexual anarchy’. He also challenges the view that literature of the period can be interpreted as a neat procession from realism to Modernism.
Download or read book Culture Philanthropy and the Poor in Late Victorian London written by Geoffrey A. C. Ginn and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In refreshing our understanding of this obscure but eloquent activism, Ginn approaches cultural philanthropy not simply as a project of class self-interest, nor as fanciful ‘missionary aestheticism.’ Rather, he shows how liberal aspirations towards adult education and civic community can be traced in a number of centres of moralising voluntary effort. Concentrating on Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, the People’s Palace in Mile End, Red Cross Hall in Southwark and the Bermondsey Settlement, the discussion identifies the common impulses animating practical reformers across these settings. Ginn shows how these were shaped by a distinctive diagnosis of urban deprivation and anomie.
Download or read book Home in British Working Class Fiction written by Nicola Wilson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Literature Journalism and the Vocabularies of Liberalism written by J. Macleod and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the impact of the new liberalism on English literary discourse from the fin-de-siècle to World War One. It maps out an extensive network of journalists, men of letters and political theorists, showing how their shared political and literary vocabularies offer new readings of liberalism's relation to an emerging modernist culture.
Download or read book Labour s Apprentices written by Michael J. Childs and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1994-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three decades before the First World War witnessed significant changes in the working life, home life and social life of adolescent English males. In Labour's Apprentices, Michael Childs suggests that the study of such age-specific experiences provides vital clues to the evolving structure and fortunes of the working class as a whole and helps to explain subsequent development in English history. Beginning with home life, Childs discusses the life cycle of the working-class family and considers the changes that becoming a wage-earner and a contributor to the family economy made to a youth's status. He explores the significance of publicly provided education for the working class and analyses the labour market for young males, focusing on the role of apprenticeship, the impact of different types of labour on future job prospects, the activities of trade unions, and wage levels. Childs makes a detailed investigation of the patterns of labour available to boys at that time, including street selling, half-time labour, and apprenticed labour versus "free" labour. He argues that such changes were a major factor in the creation of a semi-skilled adult workforce. Childs then examines the choices that working-class youths made in the area of their greatest freedom: leisure activities. He looks at street culture, commercial entertainments, and youth groups and movements and finds that each influenced the emergence of a more cohesive and class-conscious working class during the period up to the First World War.
Download or read book Workers Tales written by Michael Rosen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of political tales—first published in British workers’ magazines—selected and introduced by acclaimed critic and author Michael Rosen In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unique tales inspired by traditional literary forms appeared frequently in socialist-leaning British periodicals, such as the Clarion, Labour Leader, and Social Democrat. Based on familiar genres—the fairy tale, fable, allegory, parable, and moral tale—and penned by a range of lesser-known and celebrated authors, including Schalom Asch, Charles Allen Clarke, Frederick James Gould, and William Morris, these stories were meant to entertain readers of all ages—and some challenged the conventional values promoted in children’s literature for the middle class. In Workers’ Tales, acclaimed critic and author Michael Rosen brings together more than forty of the best and most enduring examples of these stories in one beautiful volume. Throughout, the tales in this collection exemplify themes and ideas related to work and the class system, sometimes in wish-fulfilling ways. In “Tom Hickathrift,” a little, poor person gets the better of a gigantic, wealthy one. In “The Man Without a Heart,” a man learns about the value of basic labor after testing out more privileged lives. And in “The Political Economist and the Flowers,” two contrasting gardeners highlight the cold heart of Darwinian competition. Rosen’s informative introduction describes how such tales advocated for contemporary progressive causes and countered the dominant celebration of Britain’s imperial values. The book includes archival illustrations, biographical notes about the writers, and details about the periodicals where the tales first appeared. Provocative and enlightening, Workers’ Tales presents voices of resistance that are more relevant than ever before.
Download or read book A History of American Working Class Literature written by Nicholas Coles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Conceiving the City written by Nicholas Freeman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-09-20 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceiving the City is an innovative study of the ways in which a generation of late-Victorian novelists, poets, painters, and theoreticians attempted to represent London in literature and art. Breaking away from the language and style of Dickens and the static panorama paintings of William Powell Frith, major figures such as Henry James and J. M. Whistler, and, crucially, less-celebrated authors such as Arthur Machen, Edwin Pugh, and George Egerton bent realism into exciting new shapes. In the naturalism of George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, the fragmentary impressions of Ford Madox Ford, and the brooding mystery of Alvin Langdon Coburn's photogravures, London emerged as a focus for dynamic, explicitly modern art. Although many of these insights would be dismissed or at least downplayed by subsequent generations, the ideas evolved during the period from 1870 to 1914 anticipate not only the work of high modernists such as Eliot and Woolf, but also that of later urban theorists such as Foucault and de Certeau, and the novels and travelogues of contemporary London writers Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Nicholas Freeman recovers a sense of late-Victorian London as a subject for dynamic theoretical and aesthetic experiments, and shows, in stimulating analyses of Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Arthur Symons, and others how much of our understanding of urban space we owe to eminent (and not so eminent) Victorian figures. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book restores a much-needed historical perspective to our engagement with the metropolis.
Download or read book Working Class Hollywood written by Steven J. Ross and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time when going to the movies could transform lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a working-class film movement that challenged the dominant political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth- century America. Surveying several hundred movies made by or about working men and women, Ross shows how filmmakers were far more concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at any subsequent time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended working people and chastised their enemies. Worker filmmakers went a step further and produced movies from A Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike (1929) that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unions, and socialism to transform a nation. J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers. Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people's dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.
Download or read book The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s written by Richard Schneirov and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pullman strike of 1894 shut down the rail system from Chicago to the West Coast, culminating two decades of labor unrest and helping to define an epochal transition in American history. In this wide-ranging collection, leading labor historians use the prism of the Pullman strike to broaden our understanding of the crisis of the 1890s. By examining the strike in the context of continuities and changes in labor organization, the influences of gender and community, the public representation and contested meaning of labor conflict, the emergence of a new politics of progressive reform, the development of a regulatory state, and a changing legal environment, these essays resituate the Pullman conflict in its historical context. Illuminating one of the most important events in labor's past, The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s testifies to the pivotal importance of the Pullman conflict and its aftermath for understanding the course of American history.
Download or read book Workers Worlds written by Andrew Davies and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manchester and Salford have a special place in the history of the British working class. They lay at the heart of the cotton industry, the spark of the industrial revolution, and as a consequence were among the first places to experience the application of steam power and the factory system to production. As a result, the Manchester-Salford conurbation was the first to see a fully-formed industrial working class. Whilst industrialization went through its heroic phase, the two cities seemed to be blazing a trail, not only for the rest of the country, but for the world. During the first half of the 19th century, social observers came from across Europe to see what they supposed to be their future. Manchester was, in Asa Briggs's influential phrase, the shock city of the age. The city demonstrated the ability of science to control nature: this was why, in 1843, Benjamin Disraeli described Manchester as the modern Athens. However, as Alexis de Tocqueville had noted eight years earlier, there was another side to increasing productivity -
Download or read book Working Class Cultures in Britain 1890 1960 written by Prof Joanna Bourke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-01-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrating a variety of historical approaches and methods, Joanna Bourke looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality and the nation to assess how the subjective identity of the 'working class' in Britain has been maintained through seventy years of radical social, cultural and economic change. She argues that class identity is essentially a social and cultural rather than an institutional or political phenomenon and therefore cannot be understood without constant reference to gender and ethnicity. Each self contained chapter consists of an essay of historical analysis, introducing students to the ways historians use evidence to understand change, as well as useful chronologies, statistics and tables, suggested topics for discussion, and selective further reading.
Download or read book Slum Travelers written by Ellen Ross and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellen Ross has collected impressions from some of the half a million women involved in philanthropy by the 1890s, most of them active in the London slums. The contributors include Sylvia Pankhurst and Beatrice Webb, as well as many more less well known figures.
Download or read book A Woman s Place written by and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Film and the Working Class written by Peter Stead and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on the social significance of the feature film. It concentrates on films which depict labour organizations and political activists, as well as life in working-class communities and actors with working-class identities such as James Cagney. Reviews of the original edition: ‘...fills a gap in film studies...the study of social and labour history, and the development of popular culture in Britain and the United States.’
