1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature

Edited By Ben Clarke Copyright 2025
462 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

462 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

462 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature provides an overview of the history, theory, and analysis of working-class literature. Taking a global and intersectional approach, the Companion demonstrates that literature is central to the (re)interpretation of the working class, a process that involves rereading the past as well as mapping the present. The collection examines how... Read more

List of Contributors

 

Introduction: What is Working-Class Literature?

Ben Clarke

 

Part I. Theorizing Working-Class Literature

Chapter 1. Working-class literature(s)

Magnus Nilsson

 

Chapter 2. Revolutionary Tendencies: Theories of Working-Class Writing

Kevin Potter

 

Chapter 3. Writing a Class to Come: Social Fiction, Heterogeneity, and the Political

Roberto del Valle Alcalá

 

Chapter 4. Seeing Anew: Making Working-Class Literature Visible Through a Working-Class Intersectional Gaze

Sherry Linkon and Pamela Fox

 

Chapter 5. Struggle as Class Motif: ‘Difficulty’ in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain

Simon Lee

 

Part II. Literature and the Making of the Working Class

Chapter 6. Literature and the Labouring Poor in Early Modern England

Chris Fitter

 

Chapter 7. The Rhyme of the Ancient Labourer: working-class poets and the classics

Henry Stead

 

Chapter 8. The Invisibility of Working-Class Self-Representation in Literary Classrooms, with a Focus on the Romantic-Period

Cassandra Falke

 

Chapter 9. Working-Class Writing in Victorian Britain, 1837-1901

Victoria Clarke

 

Chapter 10. Working-Class British Women Writers, 1840-1914: Resistance and Community

Florence Boos

 

Chapter 11. One Hundred Years of Defining (German) Working-Class Literature

Sabine Hake

 

Part III. Working-Class Literature in the Age of Extremes

Chapter 12. D. H. Lawrence, Class and Culture

Neil Roberts

 

Chapter 13. Work, Sex, and Women in D.H. Lawrence’s Fiction: Intersections of Class and Gender

Tonya Krouse

 

Chapter 14. ‘Clamouring for Revolutionary Literature’: Working-Class Writing in the Caribbean

Michael Niblett

 

Chapter 15. Coalitional Politics for Exiles and Nationalists: H. T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands

Sydney Van To

 

Chapter 16. Broken Hands: Class and Disability in 20th-Century American Poetry

Andrew David King

 

Part IV. Neoliberalism and the Future of Working-Class Literature

Chapter 17. Dramatic Representations of ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ Class Struggle in Neoliberal Britain

Elaine Aston

 

Chapter 18. Music and hope in Irish working-class recession writing: Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and Emmet Kirwan’s Dublin Oldschool

Michael Pierse

 

Chapter 19. Representations of Class and Race in East African Asian Literatures

Michael A. Rumore

 

Chapter 20. Beyond Human Futures in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Shoumik Bhattacharya

 

Chapter 21. The Labor of Migrant Subjectivity

Peter Hitchcock

 

Chapter 22. Migrant Workers in Asia Today: A Brief Introduction.

Luka Lei Zhang

 

Chapter 23. Working-Class Representation in Cinema and Literature in the Digital Age

Isabel Roque

 

Chapter 24. Common People: Breaking the Glass Ceiling in UK Publishing

Katy Shaw

 

Chapter 25. An Alternative History of Working-Class Theatre

Rebecca Hillman

 

Chapter 26. Keeping Class Visible in Recession-Era Irish Poetry

Mary McGlynn

 

Chapter 27. Proletarian Futures: Some Representations of the Working Class in Science Fiction”

Nick Hubble

 

Index

Biography

Ben Clarke is Associate Professor of Post-1900 British Literature at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. His publications include Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values (2007), Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope (with Michael Bailey and John K. Walton, 2012), and Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice (co-edited with Nick Hubble, 2018).