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The proletarian writer H. T. Tsiang worked and lived in the US under the constant threat of deportation since arriving in the country under the Johnson-Reed Act. This article examines a cache of poetry that Tsiang wrote in the Ellis Island detention center from 1940–1941 and mailed to the painter, book illustrator, and author Rockwell Kent. These poems, which are preserved among Kent's papers in the form of a toilet paper manuscript, a make-shift chapbook, and typescript sheafs, were roundly rejected by publishers in Tsiang's time. Yet they speak to his precarious immigration status and his long-term project of constituting proletarian readerships outside US publishing. Tsiang's unpublished poems, I argue, composed a counterpublic of early Chinese American writing that grew from, and responded to, the conditions of exclusion. Having been detained on both Angel Island and Ellis Island, Tsiang was willing to take the "crooked path" into US cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the impact of economic globalization on the production of contemporary literature written by working-class authors in response arguments in the book “No Country: working-class writing in the age of globalization” by Sonali Perera. Topics discussed include ethical historicism, the reading and interpretation of working-class texts, and barriers to publication for working-class literature. It also discusses the impact of Master of Fine Arts programmes on this literature.

The article offers information on the life and works of working-class poet and novelist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. It mentions that Carnie Holdsworth was born in Lancashire, England in 1886 and daughter of factory workers and union activists. Her stories frequently focus on princes and princesses, but they also critique the class and gender biases of her culture by drawing on her working-class life's personal knowledge and retaining a Marxist-influenced political perspective.

This article analyses the relationship between George Orwell and Jack Hilton and considers its implications for our understanding of the literary culture of the nineteen-thirties and forties, interactions between middle and working-class writers, and ideas of influence. It argues that although Orwell and Hilton's responses to one another's work were distorted by their class positions and commitments they nonetheless generated new texts. Hilton's reading of The Road to Wigan Pier, a project his advice helped to shape, emphasized the limitations of Orwell's representations of the working class but ignored his self-reflexive concern with the act of social exploration. Hilton's criticisms were productive, though, providing an impetus for English Ways. Orwell was enthusiastic about the book but his response to Hilton similarly obscures his complexities, reducing him to the embodiment of the idealized, masculine working class central to Orwell's own socialism. These processes of constructive misreading suggest a model of influence that is messier than conventional ideas allow, and demonstrate the complex relationships between middle and working-class writers in the nineteen-thirties and forties. The article insists on the need for a broader understanding of literature in the period that does not reduce working-class writers to part of the historical context for canonical figures. Drawing on Hilton's unpublished manuscripts and letters, it argues that he is significant in his own right and that seeing him as Orwell's peer enables us to recognize the broad, complex network of debates, arguments and misreadings to which writers in the period respond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on working-class autobiographies, this article unpacks working-class authors’ subtle use of domestic spaces in life story narrative to suggest that even small homes could be made of multiple spaces that held specific but also fluid gender-, age- and affect-related meanings. In drawing out the gendered complexities of working-class homes, the essay focuses particularly on men’s relationships to domestic space as fathers. Approaching life writing as text, the article suggests that the bifurcated model of women, home and family vs men, absence and public space falters to expose extra layers of meaning to seemingly straightforward stories of gendered worlds and spaces. This not only expands the scope for interpreting working-class interiorities in life writing but also highlights the plasticity of gendered roles and spaces in experiential contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the literature of political engagement. Topics discussed include decline of socialist realists and literary proletarians; fictions on topics like women's liberation, revolutionary environmentalism, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) activism; and modern urban-industrial life.

In late 1931, John Cheever temporarily stopped producing work for large-circulation magazines and began writing formally and stylistically experimental stories for various little magazines. This article examines the first of these stories, ‘Fall River’, an ostensibly proletarian story about mill closures and mass lay-offs in an economically depressed textile city. Cheever published ‘Fall River’ in the second issue ofThe Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimental Art,a communist little magazine published in Davenport, Iowa, in late 1931. Cheever's most recent biographer, Blake Bailey, claims that the author's turn away from the large-circulation magazine marketplace towards an emergent Midwestern literary radicalism in 1931 was a short-lived political digression by an otherwise apolitical middle-class writer. This article contests this view. Re-evaluating Cheever's professional relationship with theNew Republic(the first large-circulation magazine to publish his fiction), his personal experience of left-wing politics and his reading of little magazines between 1930 and 1931, it argues that Cheever made this decision for professionally pragmatic, rather than political, reasons. In short, it was easier for Cheever to publish his work in little magazines in the early 1930s because they were more receptive to the work of younger writers than were their mainstream counterparts. This is not to say that ‘Fall River’ was not an apolitical story, however. The article argues further that, far from being a political digression, ‘Fall River’ is in fact a self-reflexive critique of the politicisation of middle-class writers during the Depression. It uses close analysis of the text to demonstrate the extent to which Cheever's ambivalent relationship with American communism influenced some of the formal, generic, and thematic properties of the story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, archives for the collection and storage of non-professional writings, mostly life-histories by working-class authors, were established in Europe. I indicate their roles in different national contexts and the political and social ambitions of their founders. In Italy the collection by individual anthropologists, historians and political militants of autobiographical texts, oral and written, was expanded in the 1980s by the creation of a network of archivi della scrittura popolare, dedicated to gathering life-writings in their many forms. The most important was the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale at Pieve Santo Stefano, where Vincenzo Rabito's typescript is stored. I analyse the aims and achievements of its founder, Saverio Tutino, and the evolution of its influential place in Italy's cultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chartism has generated one of the liveliest historiographies of the twentieth century, with the development of new linguistic and cultural approaches in the 1980s proving to be a particularly innovative line of enquiry. Yet the shift towards language and meaning has not been without a price. In particular, the tendency to frame Chartism as an intellectual force has led scholars to overlook the fact that Chartism was also a social movement, constituted, quite literally, of millions of working men and women, who had traditionally been excluded from the political sphere.This article uses working-class autobiography to restore a social-history dimension to our understanding of Chartism. It asks how a body of men with no experience of bourgeois forms of civic engagement orchestrated such a large-scale and sophisticated political campaign. How had a working-class ‘public’, with the capacity for effective political action, been created? And how, if at all, was the emergence of the world’s first workers’ movement related to the broader socio-economic context—in particular, to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation with all the social flux they entailed? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the different practices in contemporary writing. It characterizes bourgeois literary fiction and reveals the bad writing habits of bourgeois hack-writers. Also explored are the differences in the use of language by proletarians and contemporary writers. It also describes the styles used by anti-writers.

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Focussing on Walter Greenwood's 1933 novel Love on the Dole and critical responses to it, this article aims to assess criticism of working-class writing and analyse problems in its reception. The article posits a new reading of the novel, foregrounding Greenwood's complex sexual politics, his formal and linguistic innovations and historicizing its social, economic and political sources. The article concludes with a discussion of the novel's place in the development of a working-class literary tradition in the twentieth century, asserting its significance in the evolution of a confident working-class literary idiom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relationship of Soviet author Andrei Platonov with proletarian poet Dem'ian Bednyi. It mentions the discovery of materials related to Platonov's meetings with Bednyi in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). It discusses the proletarian literature, theorist Leon Trotsky's articles on proletarian culture and Party politics in the newspaper "Pravda," and the political stand of Bednyi during the intraparty conflict of 1925-1927.

Copyright of Epos is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep" (1934) thematizes the difficulty of extrapolating from the particularity of one novel's protagonist to general political or social concerns. Contemporaneous proletarian critics and novelists such as Mike Gold had developed a poetics of proletarian fiction, hypothesizing that formal attributes such as specificity of visual detail, small- and large-scale repetition, and the "typicality" of the novel's protagonist and events would enable readers to generalize from the novel to their own lives. But "Call It Sleep's" fixation with aural repetition and visual detail simultaneously promotes and refuses generalizations from its determinedly idiosyncratic protagonist, David Schearl, to readers' experience, making the novel a limit case for the idea of novelistic typicality. Its dialectic between the particular and the general suggests, ultimately, that political change must come from external education and not from moments of individual recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The autobiographies of working-class academics look at the American university from a working-class perspective that critiques the practices of American universities, especially their unreasonable hierarchies, their denigration of teachers and teaching, and their labor practices. Focusing on two of the seven collections of essays by academics from working-class backgrounds—Ryan and Sackrey's "Strangers in Paradise" (1984) and Janet Zandy's "Liberating Memory" (1995)—we can trace the alienation of working-class academics and the increasing extent to which this alienation becomes part of an explicit opposition to the corporate university's labor practices. As the university becomes dominated by flexible labor patterns with parallels to those initiated by companies such as Wal Mart, "working-class academic" now refers not only to academics with working-class backgrounds, but also to those in the new white collar working class that includes part-time faculty. Autobiographical essays by part-time faculty such as those in Michael Dubson's collection "Ghosts in the Classroom" (2001) are part of the effort to end the exploitation of academic labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the books "Now in November," by Josephine Johnson and "Yonnondio: From the Thirties," by Tillie Lerner Olsen is presented. The author discusses how both authors investigated issues of both class and gender through proletarian literature. Johnson's book focuses on a woman's revolutionary mindset. Olsen's book began as a short story and focuses on how class inequities influence the artistic development of the main character.

The article profiles proletarian writer Kuroshima Denji. Unlike most of the successful proletarian writers Kuroshima was not a university graduate. He was able to establish his reputation with the publication of the short story "Tongun" in 1927. The "Siberia Under Snow" was one of Kuroshima's literary piece, which focus on the soldiers expedition to Siberia in the event of the October Revolution.

The article discusses working-class autobiographies of Imperial Germany. In his autobiography "Unterwegs. Eine Selbstbiographie," factory worker and later Social Democrat Heinrich Holek links himself to his ancestors. One of the primary practical purposes of German working-class autobiographies is to articulate their authors' opposition to the ideological images of laborers formed by nineteenth-century society. Many of these portrayals cast workers as fundamentally immoral and therefore as physically and sexually exploitable creatures, such as in the view held by the lord of the manor in Heinrich Holek's anecdote. This essay first examines the allegation of proletarian immorality as a discursive upper-class strategy to gain influence.

The article focuses on the decline of the real living standards of rural laborers in Great Britain. According to the author, Landscape park are funded by a highly commercialized system of agriculture thus eroding the moral economy of a paternalistic rural society. He also emphasized that plebeian poets believe that landscape parks are the ultimate expression of the polarization of relations between the participate and the populace.

The article focuses on the demands of laboring-class religious poetry by Susannah Harrison in Great Britain. According to the author, the resignation to Providence removes the responsibility for suffering to the divine plane and puts oppression within an absolute or transcendental context. He added that her poems show tastes and interests that were important to her contemporaries and speak for an age in which questions of faith were central to how people attempted to find meaning in their lives.

This essay explores how Wanda Coleman's poetry exhibits both a womanish wisdom, informed by her experience as a working-class writer, and social critiques of gender and racial stereotypes, the poetry world's elitism, and language itself. Presentation of poetry as a form of wily social commentary in Coleman's books; Sexual politics of Coleman's poetry; Information on several poems by Coleman.

This essay presents a tribute to Theodore W. Allen, a working-class intellectual and activist and author of the book "The Invention of the White Race," who died of cancer in January 2005. Allen's discussion of the racial alliance between a numerically small class of white slave holders and the majority of property-less European-American bond-laborers; Issue of whiteness; Analysis of Allen's work, life and writings.

This article seeks to highlight the importance of an underused and underappreciated resource, namely working-class autobiography written by those who were employed in the railway industry. Because of the sheer number of such publications, a peculiar feature itself of the industry, I have chosen to focus this discussion specifically upon the autobiographies and oral histories produced by those who experienced employment in railway workshops. The article opens with an examination of railway historiography, and in particular the criticism made of it by academics and other writers who view the field as overly romantic and nostalgic. Close attention will be paid to what could be viewed as the inherent tension between such criticism and unexpected advantages of these very flaws, namely that the demand on the part of the enthusiasts for detail of railway operation creates a market for the publication of shopfloor reminiscences. The second focus of interest will be the autobiographies themselves, written by employees from various railway workshops in England and Scotland, both public and private-sector. Questions will be asked as to how far these publications represent an important resource for the study of railway history, and the methodological problems entailed in their use will be examined. The article will conclude by attempting to locate these examples of autobiography within the wider historical debate on the use of qualitative material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the radical politics of 'Heart of Aztlán' by Rudolfo Anaya in the context of the thematic and structural strategies that typify U.S. proletarian discourse and its global links to leftist, socialist and Marxist literary movements. Overview of the U.S. proletarian literary production; Background of the Chicano movement's struggles for civil rights; Problems and power structures intended to suppress the proletariat.

El artículo habla de la crítica literaria del escritor peruano José Carlos Mariátegui. Mariátegui es uno de los fundadores de la literatura indigenista y es bien conocido por su radicalismo político. El ensayista peruano ha estudiado varios autores internacionales como James Joyce, Miguel de Unamuno, y John Dos Passos. Según el artículo, la crítica de Mariátegui consistió de las relaciones entre los vanguardistas de su tiempo, el indigenismo y el realismo proletario.

Focuses on the contributions of writer Heiner Muller in theater performances in Germany. Details on proletarian tragedies in the period of counter-revolution; Description of characters appeared in performances; Details on literary styles of Muller; Reference on theoretical works of Muller.

Discusses the profusion of working-class autobiographies in the 19th century. Characteristics of proletarian autobiographers; Attempts of autodidacts at self-improvement; Greater inclination of skilled workers to write autobiographies than industrial factory workers; Details of the autobiography of James Hopkinson.

Examines literature written by women about the American working class, as discussed in the books `Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur,' by Constance Coiner and `Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness,' edited by Janet Zandy. Analysis of the American proletarian literary movement of the 1930s; Women's writings about their experiences.

Examines the significance of the cultural sector's indifference to 20th-century poet Edwin Rolfe to working-class American poetics. Perception of Rolfe as the poetic emanation of America's immigrant, working-class community; Rolfe's life as Solomon Fishman; Rolfe's definition of political commitment by subordinating its cultural representation; Rolfe's poetic career.

Investigates Ralph Ellison's affiliation with the Communist Party (CP) and his reputation as a proletarian journalist. Ellison's works and activities which belie his denial of a close relationship with the CP; Writings on war and fascism.

This paper attempts to explain the continuous friction between Marxist sociology and Marxist ideology in terms of the premises of the theory of scientific communism, which accords to proletarian ideology the status of scientific truth. The successive stages of the evolution of Soviet sociology are related to the parallel development of views on the scientific ethos. The notion of the "ethos of ideology" is introduced and applied to the analysis of the ideological turmoil Soviet sociology underwent in the course of 'its establishment as an academic discipline. "Value tolerance" is advocated as an alternative to the "value-partisan" and "value-neutral" orientations in social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]