Representing revolt: working-class representation as a literary and political practice from the General Strike to the Winter of Discontent

Ron, Matti (2020) Representing revolt: working-class representation as a literary and political practice from the General Strike to the Winter of Discontent. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Though the dual sense of representation—as an issue of both aesthetic or organisational forms—has long been noted within Marxist literary criticism and political theory, these differing uses of the term have generally been considered to be little more than semantically related. This thesis, then, seeks to address this gap in the discourse by looking at working-class representation as both a literary and political practice to show that their relationship is not just one of being merely similar or analogous, but rather that they are structurally homologous. To demonstrate this point, this thesis will perform close readings of clusters of texts to chart the development of working-class fiction between two high-points of class struggle in Britain—the 1926 General Strike and the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent—with the intention of exploring a variety of working-class representational practices. Through this, it will be shown that the homology between working-class literary and political representations manifests in the realist working-class fiction under discussion lending itself more readily to those political practices most closely adhering to representational political forms while the experiments of the—much neglected—working-class literary avant-garde, which challenged the boundaries of realism, would lend themselves to those movements similarly challenging representational political practices. In doing so, this thesis draws upon and intervenes in over a century of Marxist literary critical debate, in which the working class—as both a literary and political subject—has often remained curiously absent.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature and Creative Writing (former - to 2011)
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	02 Dec 2020 09:33
Last Modified:	02 Dec 2020 09:33
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/77864
DOI:

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