The Deindustrial Novel: Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the Working Class

2018 ◽  
pp. 229-246
Author(s):  
Phil O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Twenty First Century

scholarly journals At Work in Meadowvale Village

2018 ◽  
Vol 108 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-254
Author(s):  
Thomas F. McIlwraith
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Vernacular Landscape

Ontario’s industrial and working-class history has deep roots in the water-powered mills and factories that lined scores of streams throughout the province. Each site drew its cluster of dwellings, general stores, church sanctuaries, travellers’ rests and more. Meadowvale village, founded in the 1830s on the Credit River in Mississauga, is one of these places, and, not simply by chance, it continues to display its mill village vernacular landscape generations after its industrial heyday has passed. Thanks to a community of energetic volunteers responding to opportunities provided by the Ontario Heritage Act (1974), plus a receptive civic administration, this gem of traditional Ontario has withstood suburbanization as it swept across the region. Meadowvale flourishes in the twenty-first century as a distinctive residential enclave in a huge sprawling city.

Twenty-First-Century Writers: The Rural Southern Tradition Continues

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean W. Cash
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Rural Families ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Universal Themes

This chapter focuses on twenty-first-century writers who carry on the rural southern tradition in their work. Since 2000, several young southern writers, nearly all born after 1975 and from middle-class rural and lower-class backgrounds, have begun to publish fiction. Both portraying the areas where they were born and grew up and transcending those settings to address more universal themes, they have produced a significant body of praiseworthy work. Most were born into rural families but received the benefits of post-secondary education, but all seem committed to presenting the working-class South with realism and empathy. Among these new novelists are Joe Samuel Starnes, Peter Farris, John Brandon, Wiley Cash, Skip Horack, Barb Johnson, Michael Farris Smith, and Jesmyn Ward. Clearly, novels that address southern characters in southern scenes will continue to be written, whether of the Rough South variety from writers like Johnson or from writers like Ward, Horack, Brandon, Cash, and Smith.

Twenty-First-Century Fiction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Lea
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
21St Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Critical Success ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Areas Of Concern ◽  
Literary Writing ◽  
Twenty First Century

This study explores the landscape of contemporary British fiction through detailed analysis of five authors that have emerged to critical prominence in the 21st century. The authors addressed - Ali Smith, Andrew O’Hagan, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Hall, and Jon McGregor – have all established themselves through popular and critical success, but have received significantly less attention than some of their peers. This book does not seek to thrust these authors into a putative canon of 21st century literary writing, but rather to explore through close attention to the resonances, continuities, elisions, and frictions across their works the temper of the contemporary moment as it is expressed by a group of writers. Each is devoted a chapter that analyses their creative output to-date within the frame of their stylistic and thematic development, as well as drawing comparisons across their writing and that of their peers. The intention is never to provide the kind of synoptical overview that a period-study might suggest, instead Twenty-First Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices seeks to juxtapose critical readings within a constellation of contemporary literary concerns to examine what cultural energies and flows are emerging in the new century. In doing so, it identifies three recurrent areas of concern that might be said to infiltrate our times; these are Materiality, Connectivity, and Authenticity. In many forms and through many articulations, these issues emerge as insistent – if inchoate – questions about how current literary practice is responding to the challenge of the post-millennial world.

scholarly journals Whatever Happened to the Canaanites? Principles of a Christian Ethic of Mass Immigration

2021 ◽  
pp. 095394682110466
Author(s):  
Nigel Biggar
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
First Century ◽  
Christian Ethic ◽  
Open Borders ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
European Colonialism

This article aims to articulate a set of general principles of a Christian ethic of mass immigration. Toward this end, it considers: biblical and theological grounds for cosmopolitanism (and ‘open borders’); biblical and theological caveats against cosmopolitanism; elements of a Christian ethic of the treatment of near and distant neighbours; what Francisco de Vitoria’s ‘On the American Indians’ has to contribute; what lessons should be learned from the history of European colonialism; and the nature of mass immigration into twenty-first-century Europe and the problems it entails. The article concludes with six principles: relevant empirical data should be mastered before developing a judgement; concerns about mass immigration should not be dismissed out of hand as ‘racist’; care of the alien may take a variety of forms, not only that of granting asylum; illegal economic immigrants should normally be returned home; compassion should look in several directions—not only at the migrant, but also at the working-class competitor for jobs and services, and at members of government burdened with the responsibility of making hard decisions; and the Christian is obliged to exercise, not only compassion, but justice and prudence.

scholarly journals Capitalist realism: Glimmers, working-class authenticity and Andrea Dunbar in the twenty-first century

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Katie Beswick
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Project ◽  
Marketing Materials ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article thinks through how registers of ‘the real’ have operated in working-class representations, from social realism (in film, theatre, drama and soap opera) to reality television and appeals to ‘authenticity’ in publicity and marketing materials for cultural products purporting to represent the working class. It argues that the ubiquity of ‘the real’ in representations of working-class experience is one way in which Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’ asserts itself. The article argues that experiments with form and intertextuality can offer ‘glimmers’ through which slippages in claims to absolute reality are revealed. It explores the possibility for such ‘glimmers’ in experimentations with Andrea Dunbar’s work in the twenty-first century, reasserting the importance of form in dismantling the neo-liberal political project.

Changing the Climate: Some Provisional Conclusions

2020 ◽  
pp. 190-194
Author(s):  
Andrew Milner ◽  
J.R. Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Real World ◽  
Value Relevance ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Force ◽  
Anthropogenic Global Warming ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century

The chapter opens with an account of the ‘value relevance’ of the authors’ own loosely ‘Green’ beliefs and of how these led them to search for a cli-fi version of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. They conclude that no such text exists as yet, but note the operation of what they term an ‘Off-Shute effect’, in which the cumulative weight of many different cli-fi texts could have a cumulative effect on real-world behaviour. One of their more striking unanticipated findings, they explain, was that none of their climate fictions, not even those by avowed socialists like Kim Stanley Robinson, depict the organised working class as the social force most likely to prevent anthropogenic global warming. They hypothesise that this is an effect of the persistence into the twenty-first century of ideological residues of postmodernism and stress that the term ‘Green’ as a political signifier derives from the Australian ‘Green bans’, that is from organised labour. The book and the chapter end with an insistence that climate fictions are warnings, rather than predictions or prophecies, and that warnings are there to be heeded and acted upon.

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