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, Working-Class Literatures: National and International Traditions 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 the incorporation or exclusion of working-class literature 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. Łódź – 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).