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The Birmingham Group
The focus of this study is the collective of writers known variously as the Birmingham Group, the Birmingham School or the Birmingham Proletarian Writers who were active in the City of Birmingham in the decade prior to the Second World War. Their narratives chronicle the lived-experience of their fellow citizens in the urban manufacturing centre which had by this time become Britain’s second city. Presumed ‘guilty by association’ with a working-class literature considered overtly propagandistic, formally conservative, or merely the naive emulation of bourgeois realism, their narratives have in consequence suffered undue critical neglect. This book repudiates such assertions by arguing that their works not only contrast markedly with other examples of working-class writing produced in the 1930s but also prove themselves responsive to recent critical assessments seeking a more holistic and intersectional approach to issues of working-class identity.
The Wound and the Dream
When the United States and other powers declined to help fight fascist power at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, forty thousand private citizens from fifty-two countries rallied to join the International Brigade's defense of the Spanish Republic. Born out of the struggle between fascism and democracy and considered the first battle of World War II, the Spanish Civil War holds tremendous ideological significance and has inspired a remarkable range of American poetry. The Wound and the Dream represents the sixty-year tradition of American poetic responses to the Spanish Civil War and provides an overview of progressive American poetry as a whole. Four of the featured poets--Alvah Bessie, Wi...
These Poor Hands
These Poor Hands: The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales', was first published in June 1939. It was an instant bestseller, and its fame catapulted its author into the front rank of 'proletarian writers'. B. L. Coombes, an English-born migrant, had lived in the Vale of Neath since before the First World War, but only turned to writing in the 1930s as a way of communicating the plight of the miners and their communities to the wider world. "These Poor Hands" presents, in a documentary style, the working life of the miner as well as the author's experiences in the lock-outs of 1921 and 1926. It demonstrates Coombes' desire to offer an accurate account of the lives of miners and their families, and carries a sincere moral charge in its description of the waste of human potential that is industrial capitalism in decline. Long out of print, "These Poor Hands" has been recognised for over sixty years as the classic miner's autobiography.
B. L. Coombes
Bert Coombes settled in south Wales in 1909, where he worked as a miner for more than forty years. He was motivated to write after witnessing the death of two work mates underground, and he determined to tell his truth about the lives of miners and their families. His first book These Poor Hands was acclaimed by critics such as J. B. Priestley and Cyril Connolly and is considered to be among the most authentically vivid accounts ever written about mining. It describes with moving simplicity the harsh conditions in which he and his comrades worked and lived and the bond which existed between them in the face of poverty, hunger, danger and death. These Poor Hands was followed by several other ...
Political Poetry as Discourse
Political Poetry as Discourse examines the works of the political poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Ebenezer Elliott, drawing comparisons to contemporary hip hoppers who take their words from local newspapers and other discursive sources that they read, hear, and observe. Local presses and news vehicles stand as cultural material forms that supply poets with words, particularly words that congeal into patterns of language, allowing the creation of a poetic discourse. As readers of these poets apply techniques and theories of discourse analysis, they reveal how poets borrow, lift, hijack, or resituate words from one or more different genres to use as tools of political change. Leonard engages...
A History of Irish Working-Class Writing
"Michael Pierse is Lecturer in Irish literature at Queen's University Belfast. His research mainly explores the writing and cultural production of Irish working-class life. Over recent years this work has expanded into new multidisciplinary themes and international contexts, including the study of festivals, digital methodologies in public humanities and theatre-as-research practices. Michael has contributed to a range of national and international publications, is the author of Writing Ireland's Working Class: Dublin after O'Casey (2011), and has been awarded several Arts and Humanities Research Council awards and the Vice Chancellor's Award at Queen's"--
The Lost Girls
The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter’s loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts’s case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins...
Revolutionary Memory
Revolutionary Memory is the most important book yet to be published about the vital tradition of leftwing American Poetry. As Cary Nelson shows, it is not only our image of the past but also our sense of the present and future that changes when we recover these revolutionary memories. Making a forceful case for political poetry as poetry, Nelson brings to bear his extraordinary knowledge of American poets, radical movements, and social struggles in order to bring out an undervalued strength in a literature often left at the canon's edge. Focused in part of the red decade of the 1930s, RevolutionaryMemory revitalizes biographical criticism for writers on the margin and shows us for the first time how progressive poets fused their work into a powerful chorus of political voices. Richly detailed and beautifully illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, Revolutionary Memory brings that chorus dramatically to life and set a cultural agenda for future work.
Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies
First published in 1996. As recently as the early 1990s, people wondered what was the future of cultural studies in the United States and what effects its increasing internationalization might have. What type of projects would cultural studies inspire people to undertake? Would established disciplines welcome its presence and adapt their practices accordingly? Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies answers such questions. It is now clear that, while striking and innovative work is underway in many different fields, most disciplinary organizations and structures have been very resistant to cultural studies. Meanwhile, cultural studies has been subjected to repeated attacks by conserva...
The Cultural Front
Denning illuminates the radical movement of artists and intellectuals, activists and workers, which strove to create a genuinely democratic popular culture in America during the 1930s.
