Working-Class Literature(S) Working-Class Literature(S) Historical and international Perspectives Edited By: John Lennon & Magnus Nilsson Working-Class Literature(s) Historical and International Perspectives Edited by John Lennon & Magnus Nilsson Published by Stockholm University Press Stockholm University SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden www.stockholmuniversitypress.se Text © The Author(s) 2017 License CC-BY Supporting Agency (funding): The publication of this book has been made possible by a generous grant from The Crafoord Foundation First published 2017 Cover Illustration: Photo by Max LaRochelle on Unsplash Cover image copyright and license: https://unsplash.com/license Cover designed by Karl Edqvist, SUP Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics ISSN: 2002-3227 ISBN (Paperback): 978-91-7635-051-5 ISBN (PDF): 978-91-7635-048-5 ISBN (EPUB): 978-91-7635-049-2 ISBN (Mobi/Kindle): 978-91-7635-050-8 DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bam This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Suggested citation: John Lennon & Magnus Nilsson (eds.). 2017 Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bam. License: CC-BY To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit https://doi.org/10.16993/bam or scan this QR code with your mobile device. Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics (SiCA) (ISSN 2002- 3227) is a peer-reviewed series of monographs and edited volumes published by Stockholm University Press. SiCA strives to provide a broad forum for research on culture and aesthetics, including the disciplines of Art History, Heritage Studies, Curating Art, History of Ideas, Literary Studies, Musicology, and Performance and Dance Studies. In terms of subjects and methods, the orientation is wide: crit- ical theory, cultural studies and historiography, modernism and modernity, materiality and mediality, performativity and visual culture, children’s literature and children’s theatre, queer and gen- der studies. It is the ambition of SiCA to place equally high demands on the academic quality of the manuscripts it accepts as those applied by refereed international journals and academic publishers of a similar orientation. SiCA accepts manuscripts in English, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. Editorial Board Staffan Bergwik, Associate Professor of History of Ideas at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Jørgen Bruhn, Professor of Comparative Literature at the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University in Växjö Elina Druker, Associate Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Johanna Ethnersson Pontara, Associate Professor of Musicology at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Kristina Fjelkestam, Professor of Gender Studies at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies at Stockholm University Malin Hedlin Hayden, Professor of Art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Christer Johansson (coordination and communication), PhD Literature, Research Officer at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Jacob Lund, Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Culture at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University Catharina Nolin, Associate Professor of Art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Ulf Olsson (chairperson), Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Meike Wagner, Professor of Theatre Studies at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University Titles in the series 1. Rosenberg, T. 2016. Don’t Be Quiet, Start a Riot! Essays on Feminism and Performance. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/baf. License: CC-BY 4.0 2. Lennon, J. & Nilsson, M. (eds.) 2017. Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16993/bam. License: CC-BY 4.0 Peer Review Policies Guidelines for peer review Stockholm University Press ensures that all book publications are peer-reviewed in two stages. Each book proposal submitted to the Press will be sent to a dedicated Editorial Board of experts in the subject area as well as two independent experts. The full manuscript will be peer reviewed by chapter or as a whole by two independent experts. A full description of Stockholm University Press’ peer-review policies can be found on the website: http://www.stockholm universitypress.se/site/peer-review-policies/ Recognition for reviewers The Editorial Board of Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics applies single-blind review during proposal and manuscript assess- ment. We would like to thank all reviewers involved in this process. Special thanks to the reviewers who have been doing the peer review of the manuscript of this book. Contents Introduction ix John Lennon & Magnus Nilsson Working-Class Literature and/or Proletarian Literature : Polemics of the Russian and Soviet Literary Left 1 Katerina Clark The Race of Class: The Role of Racial Identity Production in the Long History of U.S. Working-Class Writing 31 Benjamin Balthaser Writing of a Different Class? The First 120 years of Working-Class Fiction in Finland 65 Elsi Hyttinen & Kati Launis The Making of Swedish Working-Class Literature 95 Magnus Nilsson Mexican Working-Class Literature, or The Work of Literature in Mexico 128 Eugenio Di Stefano British Working-Class Writing: Paradox and Tension as Genre Motif 159 Simon Lee Afterword 197 John Lennon & Magnus Nilsson Contributors 207 Index 211 Introduction John Lennon & Magnus Nilsson The idea for this collection was born out of a chance encounter over coffee in a U.S. Starbucks. Over a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed the state of working-class literature as a field, the de- cline of Marxism in academia, our favorite working-class authors, and the lack of good coffe shops on U.S. campuses. We both gen- erally laid out the various trajectories of scholarly reception of working-class literature in our respective countries and realized that while there were similar trends, there were also stark differ- ences. The conversation became a bug that, in the coming weeks, we could not squash: Why, for example, was working-class litera- ture recognized as a central strand in national literature in Sweden while often discounted and marginalized in the U.S.? We each sep- arately and ineffectively chased that bug to no avail. Over email conversations, we tried to find common ground between these two national understandings but even that was difficult because we weren’t sure how the other defined fundamental terms. We contemplated how we define and categorize working-class litera- ture and questioned whether a common definition could translate across the Atlantic Ocean? Researching comparative approaches on Swedish-U.S. working-class literature quickly showed a dearth of scholarship on this particular relationship but even more im- portantly, we found that that there was very little comparative research on working-class literature across national boundaries at all. We quickly decided to co-write an essay specifically on Swedish and U.S. working-class literatures as a way to jump start this discussion. How to cite this book chapter: Lennon, J. and Nilsson, M. 2017. Introduction. In: Lennon, J. and Nilsson, M. (eds.) Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives. Pp. ix–xviii. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.16993/bam.a. License: CC-BY x Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives Working on this together allowed us to know more about each other’s literary histories, as well as our own. There was value in our discussions, an opening dialogue that expanded definitions and raised larger questions about working-class literature from a global perspective. So why weren’t more researchers doing this comparative work? This question was followed by the next logi- cal one—why aren’t we doing more? From that question emerged what would eventually become this edited collection. Our idea was to invite authors from a variety of nations who would write a compact history of the working-class literature of their country. If read as stand-alone chapters, each contribution gives an over- view of the history and research of a particular nation’s working- class literature. If read as an edited collection (which we hope you do), they contribute toward a more complex understanding of the global phenomenon of working-class literature(s). At this particular historical moment—when the disparities be- tween classes are growing, while conversations about class are becoming more marginalized (except for the plethora of opin- ion pieces assigning blame for Donald Trump’s U.S. election or Great Britain’s vote to leave the European Union on the rural lower classes)—a comparative analysis of working-class liter- ature is needed. For decades, the conceptual triumvirate of race, gender,