DOCSLIB.ORG

Working-Class Representation and the General Strike Critical Thesis

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Working-Class Representation and the General Strike Critical Thesis 'the sound of her voice… the touch of her hand': Working-class Representation and the General Strike Critical thesis & Nine Days in May A novel Sara Sha'ath Submitted toward the degree of PhD in Creative and Critical Writing School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing University of East Anglia September 2017 © This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that the use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation of extract must include full attribution. 2 Abstract The critical thesis comprises two chapters. Chapter one identifies a recurring preoccupation with voicelessness and (mis)representation in working-class fiction of the General Strike. Examining in detail James Hanley's The Furys and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Cloud Howe, I argue that attending to the way this anxiety of representation manifests itself in these texts can help us better appreciate and understand an aspect of the working-class experience of the General Strike that, though not entirely overlooked, has not received the critical attention it deserves. Chapter two approaches issues of working-class representation in historical fiction from my own position as a critic-practitioner. Through textual analysis of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, I examine the techniques and strategies available to the historical novelist when it comes to 'giving voice' to characters that have traditionally been side-lined or excluded from the historical record. The creative component of this thesis is a historical novel set during the 1926 General Strike and written from the perspective of a recently widowed young woman, Alma Cox. During the strike, Alma goes to stay with her estranged father, a trade union leader, and volunteers in the local soup kitchen. As she struggles to establish a new life in a community she deliberately left behind, Alma finds she can no longer remain politically ambivalent. The novel interweaves aspects of a troubled father-daughter relationship with the complex identity politics surrounding the strike. It explores themes of otherness and solidarity, as well as the historical problem of women's work, agency and public voice. 3 4 Contents Introduction: the General Strike and a crisis of working-class representation ............. 7 Chapter 1 –Voice, voicelessness and working-class representation in James Hanley's The Furys and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Cloud Howe ................................................. 19 Voicelessness and representational anxiety in James Hanley's The Furys ............. 25 The satirical voice in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Cloud Howe ................................... 38 Chapter 2 – Voicing the historical working class: Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy 51 Closing comments: 'the sound of her voice… the touch of her hand' ......................... 69 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 73 Nine Days in May – a novel (chapters 1 to 16) .......................................................... 89 Appendix 1: Nine Days in May (chapters 17 to 20) ................................................. 233 Appendix 2: Chapter summary ................................................................................. 275 5 6 Sara Sha'ath – Critical Thesis Introduction: the General Strike and a crisis of working-class representation The film director Federico Fellini once said, 'All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.'1 Though when I began this project I was not aware of the particular piece of grit in my shell about which the work was accumulating, it is in the nature of the creative-critical thesis to confront one's preoccupations and write with self-awareness. From the very earliest drafts and fragments, the novel was about a woman struggling to make ends meet, occupying an isolated and uncomfortable position between two social classes: 'working' and 'middle'. This was a status I observed in my mother and grandmother's lives – and to a lesser extent reflects some of my own experiences. Our family straddles the border between blue and white collar, giving us, collectively, a mixed class identity.2 It is no doubt this awareness of being newly launched into the middle class that means I am sensitive to and curious about (or, to extend the oyster metaphor, irritated by) issues of class identity.3 It was perhaps this preoccupation that drew me to the 1926 General Strike as a subject for historical fiction. Whether figured as a class war or, more soberly, as an industrial dispute, the strike offers a crucible in which to test ideas of class: what it means, how it is defined, interpreted, signified and experienced. One of the most concise summaries of the historical circumstances of the strike I have come across is this by Susan Pedersen: Called by the General Council of the TUC in support of the miners’ struggle to avoid draconian wage cuts [and an extension of working hours] in a poorly run industry being weaned off government subsidy, the strike was an astonishingly successful demonstration of working-class resolve. Between 1.5 and 3 million of a unionised workforce of around 6 million walked out on 4 May, bringing virtually all hauling, loading, lifting, drilling, driving, 1 Eugene Walter, ‘Federico Fellini: Wizard of Film’, The Atlantic Monthly, no. 216 (December 1965): 67. 2 A brief summary of the occupations of my extended family illustrates this point: my great- grandmother was a housewife and occasional char-woman. My great-grandfather and the eldest son were stone masons, all three daughters married black cab drivers (though in my grandmother's case, only upon her second marriage to my step-grandfather), and the youngest son was a chauffeur. My grandfather was a Captain in the army, later a security guard, then a technician for IBM. My grandmother was a housewife and later an office assistant. My aunt and uncle, previously an accountant and a plumber, are now owner-managers of a plumbing supplies shop. My mother was the first in the family to gain a university degree (after my elder brother and I were born), and is a systems analyst. Before he retired, my father was a security guard among other shorter-lived positions. 3 These days, I feel very much of the middle class and yet I still find there are times when the difference in upbringing is discernable – when, upon occasion, friends who are more comfortably of the middle class have found me coarse or materialistic, or when I have been frustrated in socio- political discussions by their inability to fully appreciate certain causal effects of disadvantage. 7 Sara Sha'ath – Critical Thesis stoking and even typesetting to a standstill. If the goal was to secure specific economic concessions, however, the strike was an ignominious failure. With neither the miners nor the mine-owners interested in compromise, the Conservative government determined not to negotiate, the TUC itself very reluctant to escalate matters, and, crucially, tens of thousands of volunteers falling over themselves to take over the strikers’ work, the General Council simply called the action off on the ninth day. Many strikers returned to face harsher conditions or victimisation, but the miners, living up to their unrivalled reputation for courage and cussedness, stayed out for seven months.4 Though perhaps overstating the role played by the volunteers, Pedersen quite economically notes the strike's origins, its major stakeholders and its outcome. The strike has entered public memory as the ultimate manifestation of working-class solidarity, with workers across multiple industries downing tools in sympathy with the miners. As such, it provides a unique opportunity, narratively speaking, for the thematic expansion of the experience of being between classes – with torn loyalties and conflicted ideologies magnified by historical events and an atmosphere of heightened class antagonism. The novel is, in part, an exploration of otherness at a time of (overt and imperative) solidarity.5 In order to write the novel, I needed to understand how the General Strike was experienced by people of all walks of life, but particularly by those of the industrial working class who were at the heart of the action – the strikers, their wives, families and communities. The process of researching a historical novel throws into sharp relief the differences between historical and fictional discourse. Writing in the realm of the imagination and senses, the novelist must seek out what Rebecca Stott calls ‘the materiality of the past’, its ‘smell, taste, sound, colour and texture.’ 6 The historical novelist also hopes to individuate her characters and therefore operates at the level of the individual consciousness. This is why, in order to create my working- and lower-middle-class characters, I sought first-hand 4 Susan Pedersen, ‘Triumph of the Poshocracy’, London Review of Books, 8 August 2013. 5 When it comes to the question, 'why write about the General Strike?' it's important to distinguish between solidarity as a romantic mythology attached to the strike (and associated with the equally romantic tragedy of its 'betrayal') and solidarity as organised by a number of powerful Trade Unions. My research has shown me something of what lies beneath the narrative of solidarity: how it was generated and maintained; how some strikers and family members experienced it; what sacrifices were made, and personal losses sustained, in its name. I do not look to the strike with nostalgia; if anything, my novel takes the catastrophic view of history set out by Perry Anderson: 'Not the emergence of the nation, but the ravages of empire; not progress as emancipation, but impending or consummated catastrophe. In Joycean terms, history as a nightmare from which we still cannot wake up.' (Perry Anderson, ‘From Progress to Catastrophe: Perry Anderson on the Historical Novel’, London Review of Books 33, no. 15 (28 July 2011): 28. Italics original.) 6 Rebecca Stott, ‘Dust, Like Pollen’, in Body of Work: 40 Years of Creative Writing at UEA, ed.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • From Free Cinema to British New Wave: a Story of Angry Young Men
    SUPLEMENTO Ideas, I, 1 (2020) 51 From Free Cinema to British New Wave: A Story of Angry Young Men Diego Brodersen* Introduction In February 1956, a group of young film-makers premiered a programme of three documentary films at the National Film Theatre (now the BFI Southbank). Lorenza Mazzetti, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson thought at the time that “no film can be too personal”, and vehemently said so in their brief but potent manifesto about Free Cinema. Their documentaries were not only personal, but aimed to show the real working class people in Britain, blending the realistic with the poetic. Three of them would establish themselves as some of the most inventive and irreverent British filmmakers of the 60s, creating iconoclastic works –both in subject matter and in form– such as Saturday Day and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and If… Those were the first significant steps of a New British Cinema. They were the Big Screen’s angry young men. What is British cinema? In my opinion, it means many different things. National cinemas are much more than only one idea. I would like to begin this presentation with this question because there have been different genres and types of films in British cinema since the beginning. So, for example, there was a kind of cinema that was very successful, not only in Britain but also in America: the films of the British Empire, the films about the Empire abroad, set in faraway places like India or Egypt. Such films celebrated the glory of the British Empire when the British Empire was almost ending.
    [Show full text]
  • Cultural Representations of the Moors Murderers and Yorkshire Ripper Cases
    CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MOORS MURDERERS AND YORKSHIRE RIPPER CASES by HENRIETTA PHILLIPA ANNE MALION PHILLIPS A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Modern Languages School of Languages, Cultures, Art History, and Music College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham October 2016 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract This thesis examines written, audio-visual and musical representations of real-life British serial killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady (the ‘Moors Murderers’) and Peter Sutcliffe (the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’), from the time of their crimes to the present day, and their proliferation beyond the cases’ immediate historical-legal context. Through the theoretical construct ‘Northientalism’ I interrogate such representations’ replication and engagement of stereotypes and anxieties accruing to the figure of the white working- class ‘Northern’ subject in these cases, within a broader context of pre-existing historical trajectories and generic conventions of Northern and true crime representation. Interrogating changing perceptions of the cultural functions and meanings of murderers in late-capitalist socio-cultural history, I argue that the underlying structure of true crime is the counterbalance between the exceptional and the everyday, in service of which its second crucial structuring technique – the depiction of physical detail – operates.
    [Show full text]
  • Scholarship Boys and Children's Books
    Scholarship Boys and Children’s Books: Working-Class Writing for Children in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s Haru Takiuchi Thesis submitted towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, March 2015 ii ABSTRACT This thesis explores how, during the 1960s and 1970s in Britain, writers from the working-class helped significantly reshape British children’s literature through their representations of working-class life and culture. The three writers at the centre of this study – Aidan Chambers, Alan Garner and Robert Westall – were all examples of what Richard Hoggart, in The Uses of Literacy (1957), termed ‘scholarship boys’. By this, Hoggart meant individuals from the working-class who were educated out of their class through grammar school education. The thesis shows that their position as scholarship boys both fed their writing and enabled them to work radically and effectively within the British publishing system as it then existed. Although these writers have attracted considerable critical attention, their novels have rarely been analysed in terms of class, despite the fact that class is often central to their plots and concerns. This thesis, therefore, provides new readings of four novels featuring scholarship boys: Aidan Chambers’ Breaktime and Dance on My Grave, Robert Westall’s Fathom Five, and Alan Garner’s Red Shift. The thesis is split into two parts, and these readings make up Part 1. Part 2 focuses on scholarship boy writers’ activities in changing publishing and reviewing practices associated with the British children’s literature industry. In doing so, it shows how these scholarship boy writers successfully supported a movement to resist the cultural mechanisms which suppressed working-class culture in British children’s literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Ships and Sailors in Early Twentieth-Century Maritime Fiction
    In the Wake of Conrad: Ships and Sailors in Early Twentieth-Century Maritime Fiction Alexandra Caroline Phillips BA (Hons) Cardiff University, MA King’s College, London A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Cardiff University 30 March 2015 1 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction - Contexts and Tradition 5 The Transition from Sail to Steam 6 The Maritime Fiction Tradition 12 The Changing Nature of the Sea Story in the Twentieth Century 19 PART ONE Chapter 1 - Re-Reading Conrad and Maritime Fiction: A Critical Review 23 The Early Critical Reception of Conrad’s Maritime Texts 24 Achievement and Decline: Re-evaluations of Conrad 28 Seaman and Author: Psychological and Biographical Approaches 30 Maritime Author / Political Novelist 37 New Readings of Conrad and the Maritime Fiction Tradition 41 Chapter 2 - Sail Versus Steam in the Novels of Joseph Conrad Introduction: Assessing Conrad in the Era of Steam 51 Seamanship and the Sailing Ship: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ 54 Lord Jim, Steam Power, and the Lost Art of Seamanship 63 Chance: The Captain’s Wife and the Crisis in Sail 73 Looking back from Steam to Sail in The Shadow-Line 82 Romance: The Joseph Conrad / Ford Madox Ford Collaboration 90 2 PART TWO Chapter 3 - A Return to the Past: Maritime Adventures and Pirate Tales Introduction: The Making of Myths 101 The Seduction of Silver: Defoe, Stevenson and the Tradition of Pirate Adventures 102 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Tales of Captain Sharkey 111 Pirates and Petticoats in F. Tennyson Jesse’s
    [Show full text]
  • A Writer's Calendar
    A WRITER’S CALENDAR Compiled by J. L. Herrera for my mother and with special thanks to Rose Brown, Peter Jones, Eve Masterman, Yvonne Stadler, Marie-France Sagot, Jo Cauffman, Tom Errey and Gianni Ferrara INTRODUCTION I began the original calendar simply as a present for my mother, thinking it would be an easy matter to fill up 365 spaces. Instead it turned into an ongoing habit. Every time I did some tidying up out would flutter more grubby little notes to myself, written on the backs of envelopes, bank withdrawal forms, anything, and containing yet more names and dates. It seemed, then, a small step from filling in blank squares to letting myself run wild with the myriad little interesting snippets picked up in my hunting and adding the occasional opinion or memory. The beginning and the end were obvious enough. The trouble was the middle; the book was like a concertina — infinitely expandable. And I found, so much fun had the exercise become, that I was reluctant to say to myself, no more. Understandably, I’ve been dependent on other people’s memories and record- keeping and have learnt that even the weightiest of tomes do not always agree on such basic ‘facts’ as people’s birthdays. So my apologies for the discrepancies which may have crept in. In the meantime — Many Happy Returns! Jennie Herrera 1995 2 A Writer’s Calendar January 1st: Ouida J. D. Salinger Maria Edgeworth E. M. Forster Camara Laye Iain Crichton Smith Larry King Sembene Ousmane Jean Ure John Fuller January 2nd: Isaac Asimov Henry Kingsley Jean Little Peter Redgrove Gerhard Amanshauser * * * * * Is prolific writing good writing? Carter Brown? Barbara Cartland? Ursula Bloom? Enid Blyton? Not necessarily, but it does tend to be clear, simple, lucid, overlapping, and sometimes repetitive.
    [Show full text]
  • Regeneration Study Guide
    REGENERATION TEACHERS' NOTES SYNOPSIS The film 'Regeneration' is about a real life encounter that occurred at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917 between Dr William HR Rivers (Jonathan Pryce, an army psychologist, and the poet Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby). The story is also about the young poet Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce) whose support from Sassoon enabled him to write poetry encapsulating the horrors of the First World War. Rivers is tormented by doubt about the morality of what is being done in the name of medicine. The film contains vivid imagery of war and death and contrasts the devastation of war with the tenderness of another patient, Billy Prior's, love affair with Sarah a factory girl. The story questions whether those who have been broken by war - or those like Sassoon whose moral courage have removed them from the battle front - can or should achieve regeneration Director Gillies MacKinnon Certificate 15 Running time 113 mins INTRODUCTION “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse ...A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice - is often the means of their regeneration” John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) Philosopher and Economist (Taken from ‘Dissertations and Discussions-The Contest in America’ (1859) which John Stuart Mill wrote in opposition to the proposal that England should side with the slave-owning Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861-1865) As we rapidly approach the end of the twentieth century two events which have taken place over the last hundred years still cast their shadow over the ways in which we think today - the First World War (1914-1918) and the Holocaust.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading Group Gold
    Reading Group Gold Border Crossing A Novel by Pat Barker About this Guide The following author biography and list of questions about Border Crossing are intended as resources to aid individual readers and book groups who would like to learn more about the author and this book. We hope that this guide will provide you a starting place for discussion, and suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach Border Crossing. ISBN: 978-0-374-70604-3 | 2007 About the Book As this dark, fast, and chilling novel begins, Tom Seymour, a clinical psychiatrist specializing in violent children, rescues a young man who has fallen into the river near Tom’s home in northern England. The young man turns out to be Danny Miller, whom Tom met in a professional capacity thirteen years earlier, when Danny was only ten. In fact, Tom had testified at Danny’s murder trial—and it was his expert opinion that effectively put Danny behind bars. Now Danny is back in Tom’s life, but this reunion really a coinci- dence? And was Tom correct in affirming, all those years ago, that Danny knew right from wrong, knew the implications of his actions, and knew he was committing murder? And what exactly does Danny want from Tom, now that Tom has agreed to help him sort out his troubled past? Border Crossing is a disturbing yet subtle psychological thriller that explores the nature of evil, the possibility of redemption, and the often overlapping problems of truth and identity. Praise “A sparse, headstrong writer whose style is bulletproof modern…[Border Crossing is] chilling and psych- logically persuasive… [Barker’s] unadorned prose delivers a punch when you’re not looking…as frighten- ing as it wise.”—Gail Caldwell, Boston Sunday Globe “Barker creates a sense of menace worthy of Ian McEwan…Border Crossing is replete with sharp, ex- pressive exchanges, hard poetry, and as many enigmas as implacable truths.”— Kerry Fried, The Atlantic Monthly “Barker can tell a story with the verve of a seasoned mystery writer.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction: Questions of Class in the Contemporary British Novel
    Notes Introduction: Questions of Class in the Contemporary British Novel 1. Martin Amis, London Fields (New York: Harmony Books, 1989), 24. 2. The full text of Tony Blair’s 1999 speech can be found at http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/460009.stm (accessed on December 9, 2008). 3. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Perseus Books, 2003), 16. 4. Ibid. 5. Peter Hitchcock, “ ‘They Must Be Represented’: Problems in Theories of Working-Class Representation,” PMLA Special Topic: Rereading Class 115 no. 1 January (2000): 20. Savage, Bagnall, and Longhurst have also pointed out that “Over the past twenty-five years, this sense that the working class ‘matters’ has ebbed. It is now difficult to detect sustained research interest in the nature of working class culture” (97). 6. Gary Day, Class (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 202. This point is also echoed by Ebert and Zavarzadeh: “By advancing singularity, hetero- geneity, anti-totality, and supplementarity, for instance, deconstruction has, among other things, demolished ‘history’ itself as an articulation of class relations. In doing so, it has constructed a cognitive environment in which the economic interests of capital are seen as natural and not the effect of a particular historical situation. Deconstruction continues to produce some of the most effective discourses to normalize capitalism and contribute to the construction of a capitalist-friendly cultural common sense . .” (8). 7. Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 404–405 (Hereafter, Lost Causes). 8. Andrew Milner, Class (London: Sage, 1999), 9. 9. Gavin Keulks, ed., Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 73.
    [Show full text]
  • Boots Book-Lovers' Library and the Novel: the Impact of a Circulating Library Market on Twentieth-Century Fiction
    Boots Book-lovers' Library and the novel: The impact of a circulating library market on twentieth-century fiction Article Wilson, N. (2014) Boots Book-lovers' Library and the novel: The impact of a circulating library market on twentieth-century fiction. Information and Culture: A Journal of History, 49 (4). pp. 427-449. ISSN 2164-8034 doi: https://doi.org/10.7560/ic49402 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/31358/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Published version at: http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/journals/information-culture To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7560/ic49402 Publisher: University of Texas All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online 1 Boots Book-lovers’ Library and the novel: The impact of a circulating library market on twentieth-century fiction Nicola Wilson University of Reading Department of English Literature Whiteknights University of Reading Reading RG6 6AH [email protected] This is the final author-copy of an article published in Information and Culture 49.4 (Nov/Dec 2014), 427-49. This version is under a 12 month embargo period as agreed with the publisher of the journal until Nov/Dec 2015.
    [Show full text]
  • ANTHROPOLOGY of the WORKING-CLASS Documentary Literature of 1930S Britain
    ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE WORKING-CLASS Documentary literature of 1930s Britain by Timothy Grgec A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature Victoria University of Wellington 2018 Grgec ii Grgec iii Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................... iv Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 7 1. “What is Britain?” J. B. Priestley’s English Journey ............................................................................ 25 2. Between the Tides: The Displacement of James Hanley ................................................................ 42 3. Beyond Orwell’s Nose: Obsessions with the Body in The Road to Wigan Pier .............................. 59 4. Working-Class Leisure: Science and Surrealism in The Pub and the People ..................................... 75 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 92 Works Cited ..............................................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • The Revival of the Satiric Spirit in Contemporary British Fiction1
    The Revival of the Satiric Spirit in Contemporary British Fiction1 Luis Alberto Lázaro Lafuente University of Alcalá Satiric novels have traditionally been regarded as a minor form by many critics and scholars. Aristotle had already referred to the satirists as "the more trivial" poets who wrote about the actions of meaner~persons, in stark contrast to the "more serious-minded" epic poets who represented noble actions and the lives of noble people (1965: 35-36). This attitude has persisted throughout many centuries in the history of English literature. Even though satire enjoyed its golden age in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially with the poetry of such distinguished writers as Dryden or Pope, satiric compositions in prose did not really achieve the same high position2• When with time the novel became a well• established genre, it was mainly naturalistic fiction and psychological stories that commonly attained a prominent status among the literary critics, whereas the comic and satiric novel, with a few exceptions, was relegated to a status of popular prose on the fringe of the canon, or even outside it. Indeed, in the twentieth century, several prestigious authors have offered a rather gloomy picture of the state of novelistic satire. Robert C. Elliott, for instance, said in 1960 that the great literary figures of this century were not "preeminently satirists" (1970: 223); and Patricia Meyer Spacks, in her artide "Some Reflections on Satire" first published in 1968, even stated that satiric novel s by authors such I Some ideas oí this paper have already appeared in my essay "El espíritu satírico en la novela británica contemporánea: Menipo redivivo", included in the volume edited by Fernando Galván Már• genes y centros en la literatura británica actual.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading Anger in Contemporary British Women's Working-Class Fiction
    0 'The Red Light of Emotion'. Reading Anger in Contemporary British Women's Working-Class Fiction Patricia Ann Wheeler A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Hertfordshire for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The programme of research was carried out in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Humanities, Law and Education, University of Hertfordshire November 2004 Contents Acknowledgments i Abstract ii Introduction Realism and Representation:Women and the Working-Class Novel Pages1-36 Chapter I Anger and Anxiety: Gender and Sexuality in Working-Class Writing Pages37-69 Chapter 2 'An Orange Flame of Rage': Writing with a Vengeance Pages 70-101 Chapter 3 Pat Barker: The Reclamation of Anger Pages102-133 Chapter 4 Anger and Sexual Transgression: Pat Barker's The Man Who Wasn't There Pages 134-169 Chapter 5 Masculinity and Class Antagonism: Billy Prior, Working-Class Hero Pages170-198 Chapter 6 Anger and Alienation: Livi Michael's Invisible Women Pages199-227 Chapter 7 Angry Young Women: Recent Feminist Fictions Pages228- 256 Bibliography Pages 257- 277 i Acknowledgments With very grateful thanks to my two supervisors Dr Nahem Yousaf at Nottingham Trent University and Dr Sharon Monteith at the University of Nottingham (both formerly of the University of Hertfordshire). I fully acknowledge their academic guidance, their rigorous attention to the work in progress and their unfailing support and patience throughout the research and writing of this thesis. I hope they know how much their friendship and guidance means to me. I also thank David Wheeler for his continuing support and for finding the latest IT gadgetsto help in my writing, and for Emily and Benjamin Wheeler for trying to keep me on track.
    [Show full text]