Home in British Working-Class Fiction

ISBN-13: 9781409432418 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 252 str.

Nicola Wilson

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Introduction; Chapter 1 Writing Home and Class; Chapter 2 The Forefathers of the Working-Class Novel; Chapter 3 Working Women and the Little House; Chapter 4 Home on the Dole in the Hungry Thirties; Chapter 5 Anger, Affluence and Domesticity; Chapter 6 The Uprooted and the Anxious; Chapter 7 Estates and the New Slum Life; Chapter 101 Afterword;

O autorze

Nicola Wilson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Reading, UK.