British working-class fiction : narratives of refusal and the struggle against work / Roberto del Valle Alcalá.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Del Valle Alcalá, Roberto, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

English fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

Working class in literature.

Capitalism in literature.

Labor in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

ix, 192 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Summary:

British Working-Class Fiction offers an account of British literary responses to work from the 1950s to the onset of the financial crisis of 2008. Roberto del Valle Alcalá argues that throughout this period working-class writing develops new strategies of resistance against the social discipline imposed by capitalist work. As the latter becomes an increasingly pervasive and inescapable form of control and as its nature grows abstract, diffuse, and precarious, writing about it acquires a new antagonistic quality, producing new forms of subjective autonomy and new imaginaries of a possible life beyond its purview. By tracing a genealogy of working-class authors and texts that in various ways define themselves against the social discipline imposed by post-war capitalism, this book analyses the strategies adopted by workers in their attempts to identify and combat the source of their oppression. Drawing on the ideas of a wide range of theorists, including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, del Valle Alcalá offers a systematic and innovative account of British literary treatments of work. The book includes close readings of fiction by Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Nell Dunn, Pat Barker, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Monica Ali and Joanna Kavenna. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Introduction: British Working-Class Fiction and the Struggle Against Work 1

2 Between Capitalist Subsumption and Proletarian Independence: Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and the Post-War Working Class 11

2.1 From consensus to antagonism, or, the post-war rebirth of subjectivity 11

2.2 From the factory to the social: Alan Sillitoe's proletarian subjects 19

2.3 Capitalist subjectivation in David Storey's This Sporting Life 36

3 Reproductive Work and Proletarian Resistance in Transition: Nell Dunn and Pat Barker 49

3.1 Desire and the labour of subjectivity: On Nell Dunn's proletarian women 49

3.2 Reproduction in revolt: Pat Barker's Union Street 63

3.3 Prostitution, death and the subversion of life in Blow Your House Down 76

4 Beyond Civil Society: Proletarian Exodus in James Kelman and Irvine Welsh 87

4.1 The collapse of measure: Postmodern abstraction and proletarian flight in James Kelman 88

4.2 Beyond civil society: On Irvine Welsh's Skagboys 110

5 Work in Crisis: Precarious Subversions in Monica Alli and Joanna Kavenna 133

5.1 Untamed bodies, fleeing minds: Monica Ali's In the Kitchen 135

5.2 'Madness, the absence of work': On Joanna Kavenna's Inglorious 157

6 Conclusion 171.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781474273749

1474273742

OCLC:

920451388

Publisher Number:

40025793270