Transnational Working-Class Literatures

 “This is a monumental collection with groundbreaking implications for the study  of working-class literature, which has too often been viewed solely from within a limited national perspective. In its geographical scope and pluralistic definition of its subject, Transnational Working-Class Literatures: Canons and Connections in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries will surely become required reading for future scholars and students and inspire further projects both in and outside the UK.”

— Florence Boos, Professor of English, University of Iowa, USA

 

This book offers a pioneering study of the national, transnational, and international dimensions of working-class literature. It explores both the historically and geographically varied nature of the relationship between working-class literatures and national ‘canons’, and the importance of international and transnational exchanges in the development of working-class literature. Through a series of detailed case studies (its sixteen essays analyse working-class literatures from the early nineteenth century to the present day and cover thirteen countries across three continents) this collection not only analyses the factors which lead to working-class literature either being incorporated within, or excluded from, a given national ‘canon’, but also traces the various ways in which working-class literatures participate in international networks of exchange. With its wide historical range, extensive geographical coverage and broad definition of working-class literature, which includes samba poetry as well as socialist realism, this collection charts new territory for the study of working-class literature.

 

Wiktor Marzec is Assistant Professor at the Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. His publications include, Rising Subjects: The 1905 Revolution and the Origins of Modern Polish Politics (2020) and the co-authored From Cotton and Smoke. ¿ód¿ – Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994 (2019).

Magnus Nilsson is Professor of Comparative Literature at Malmö University, Sweden. Working-class literature is his main area of expertise. His publications include Literature and Class: Aesthetical-Political Strategies in Modern Swedish Working-Class Literature (2014) and Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives (two volumes, edited with John Lennon, 2017 and 2020).

Mike Sanders is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester, UK. Chartist literature and culture is his main area of expertise. His publications include, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (2009) and the co-edited collection, Subaltern Medievalisms: Medievalism ‘ from below’ in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2021).