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Introduction

Class

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Poetry and Class

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Abstract

The introduction sets out the scope of the study and its necessary limitations. It reviews some definitions of the difficult concept ‘class’ and notes that regardless of the exact meaning of the term, and however we may theorise it away, the lived experience of it has demonstrable effects.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sandie Byrne, ‘Poetry and Class’ in Edward Larrissy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 116–129.

  2. 2.

    Lawrence Driscoll, Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

  3. 3.

    John Kirk, The British Working Class in the Twentieth Century: Film, Literature and Television (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009); first published as Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).

  4. 4.

    Julian Markels, The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003).

  5. 5.

    Pamela Fox, Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).

  6. 6.

    Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  7. 7.

    Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke and Christ Weedon, eds, Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (London: Methuen, 1985).

  8. 8.

    Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting (Plymouth: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 1997).

  9. 9.

    Gustav H. Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton: Harvester, 1985).

  10. 10.

    Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji, eds, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

  11. 11.

    John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan, eds, A History of Working-Class Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

  12. 12.

    Sonali Perera, No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

  13. 13.

    P.M. Ashraf, Introduction to Working-Class Literature (Berlin, Humbolt University, 1980).

  14. 14.

    Donna Landry, ‘Foreword’ in John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan, eds, A History of Working-class Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. xvii–xxi (xvii).

  15. 15.

    Paul Bentley, Ted Hughes, Class and Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

  16. 16.

    Neil Roberts, ‘Poetry and Class: Tony Harrison, Peter Reading, Ken Smith, Sean O’Brien’ in Neil Corcoran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 215–229.

  17. 17.

    David Kennedy, ‘“What does the fairy DO?”: The staging of antithetical masculine styles in the poetry of Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn’, Textual Practice 14.1 (2000), 115–136.

  18. 18.

    Peter Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999).

  19. 19.

    Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940, Longman Literature in English Series (Harlow: Longman, 1993).

  20. 20.

    Gary Lenhart, The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

  21. 21.

    Roberts, op. cit., p. 215.

  22. 22.

    For useful definitions see Peter Calvert, The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 10 ff.

  23. 23.

    Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious : Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981); rprnt, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 290–291.

  24. 24.

    Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), p. 230.

  25. 25.

    Williams, op. cit., p. 231.

  26. 26.

    Williams, op. cit., p. 238.

  27. 27.

    Williams, op. cit., p. 239.

  28. 28.

    Richard D. Altick, ‘The Sociology of Authorship: The Social Origins, Education, and Occupations of 1,100 British Writers, 1800–1935’ Bulletin of the New York Public Library 66 (1962), 389–404.

  29. 29.

    Fred B. Millett, Contemporary British Literature: A Critical Survey and 232 Author-bibliographies, 3rd rev. edn (New York: G. Harrap, 1935).

  30. 30.

    Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, Twentieth-Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, 2 vols (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1942).

  31. 31.

    Altick, op. cit., p. 391.

  32. 32.

    Robert Southey, ‘Introduction: Lives and Works of Our Uneducated Poets’, in Attempts in Verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant (London: John Murray, 1831).

  33. 33.

    Adrian Caesar, Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class and Ideology in the 1930s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 1.

  34. 34.

    Caesar, ibid.

  35. 35.

    Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); rev. edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), pp. 24–25.

  36. 36.

    Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone (1968); rprnt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), p. 46.

  37. 37.

    Terry Nichols Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘Are Social Classes Dying’, International Sociology 6.4 (1991), 397–410 (397).

  38. 38.

    Jan Pahl, Money and Marriage (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 710.

  39. 39.

    Richard Breen and Christopher T. Whelan, Social Mobility and Social Class in Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996), p. 142.

  40. 40.

    Thomas Blount, Glossographia, or A dictionary, interpreting all such hard words, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon; as are now used in our refined English tongue. Also the terms of divinity, law, physick, mathematicks, heraldry, anatomy, war, musick, architecture; and of several other arts and sciences explicated. With etymologies, definitions, and historical observations on the same. Very useful for all such as desire to understand what they read. (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1656) pages unnumbered. English ShortTitle Catalogue R5788. Spelling modernised.

  41. 41.

    Calvert, op. cit., p. 13.

  42. 42.

    Blount, op. cit., np.

  43. 43.

    Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976); rev. edn (London: Fontana, 1983), p. 60.

  44. 44.

    Williams, op. cit., p. 61.

  45. 45.

    Williams, op. cit., p. 62.

  46. 46.

    Williams, op. cit., p. 65.

  47. 47.

    Williams, op. cit., p. 64.

  48. 48.

    Williams, op. cit., p. 68.

  49. 49.

    Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), trans. Terrell Carver, in Mark Cowling and James Martin, eds, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)modern Interpretations (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 19–112 (100–101).

  50. 50.

    Gary Day, Class, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2001).

  51. 51.

    Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 24, quoted in David Aers, ‘Class, Gender, Medieval Criticism, and Piers Plowman’ in Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing, eds, Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 59–75 (60).

  52. 52.

    Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 330–331, quoted in Aers, op. cit., p. 61. Aers’s emphasis.

  53. 53.

    Elster, ibid., quoted in Aers, op. cit., p. 60.

  54. 54.

    Jameson, op. cit., pp. 83–84.

  55. 55.

    See Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 258.

  56. 56.

    Day, op. cit., p. 12. This sets aside aesthetic and other aspects of value.

  57. 57.

    Day, op. cit., p. 15.

  58. 58.

    Ibid.

  59. 59.

    F.R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930), pp. 3–4.

  60. 60.

    Day cites the OED 1963. Day, op. cit., p. 15, but the phrase comes from Henry Bradshaw, The Life of Saint Werburge of Chester (1513); Pynson’s 1521 edn ed. Carl Horstman, EETS OS 88 (London: N. Trübner, 1887) II, ll. 3–5 (p. 131).

  61. 61.

    Andrew J. Milner, Class , Core Cultural Concepts (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1999), p. 122.

  62. 62.

    Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Les Edition de Minuit, 1979) translated as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 13.

  63. 63.

    Lyotard, op. cit., p. 17.

  64. 64.

    Milner, op. cit., p. 123.

  65. 65.

    Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities or, The End of the Social and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1978, 1983), p. 85.

  66. 66.

    Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 86.

  67. 67.

    Milner, op. cit., p. 11.

  68. 68.

    Gordon Marshall, David Rose, Howard Newby and Carolyn Vogler, Social Class in Modern Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1988), pp. 143; 247–248. Milner’s reference.

  69. 69.

    Milner, op. cit., p. 11. Marshall et al., op. cit., pp. 267–268. Milner’s reference.

  70. 70.

    Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1996).

  71. 71.

    Erik Olin Wright, ‘The continuing importance of class analysis’ in Lois Weis, ed., The Way Class Works: Readings on School, Family and the Economy (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 25–43 (36).

  72. 72.

    Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 143.

  73. 73.

    Scott Lash and Roy Boyne, ‘Communicative Rationality and Desire’ in Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism. (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 114–122 (116).

  74. 74.

    Ken Worpole, Once I was a Washing Machine: The Working-class Experience in Poetry and Prose (Brighton: Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, 1989), p. 1.

  75. 75.

    Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’ in Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981), pp. 1–42 (9–10), quoted in Britton J. Harwood, ‘Building Class and Gender into Chaucer’s Hous’ in Harwood and Overing, op. cit., pp. 95–111 (95). Hartmann’s emphasis.

  76. 76.

    Harwood, op. cit., p. 95.

  77. 77.

    Aers, op. cit., p. 73.

  78. 78.

    Stefan Collini, ‘Grievance Studies: How not to do Cultural Criticism’, in Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 252–268 (257–258).

  79. 79.

    Jameson, op. cit., p. 84.

  80. 80.

    Jameson, op. cit., p. 283.

  81. 81.

    Jameson, op. cit., p. 95.

  82. 82.

    Elizabeth I’s ‘pervasive cultural presence’ is said by Louis Adrian Montrose to be a ‘pervasive cultural condition of the play’s [Midsummer Night’s Dream] imaginative possibility’. ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’ in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 31–64 (32).

  83. 83.

    Stein Ringen, ‘The Open Society and the Closed Mind’, Times Literary Supplement (24 January 1997), p. 6.

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    Sandie Byrne

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Byrne, S. (2020). Introduction. In: Poetry and Class. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_1

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