The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question

2017 | Essays

This book reformulates our understanding of the relationship between proletarian literature and modernism in Britain by demonstrating that these two literary categories were not opposed aesthetically or politically but shared a commitment both to representing the fullness of intersubjective experience and to effecting the cultural transformation of everyday life. Critical analysis and close readings of key works of proletarian literature such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair and John Sommerfield's May Day are placed within a literary history stretching from early encounters between Ford Madox Ford and D.H. Lawrence to the activity of Mass Observation in the Second World War. Through this analysis, the category of proletarian literature is reconceptualised as extending beyond the limiting associations of working-class authenticity or socialist realism to encompass complex ideas of temporality and consciousness, which can be directly linked to those found in the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Nick Hubble (Author)