scholarly journals THE CONCEPT OF “EXPERIENCE” AND THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, 1924–1963

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
STUART MIDDLETON
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
New Left ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
A Site

Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.

scholarly journals The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Reynolds ◽  
K. Lay Bourn
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Union Support ◽  
Domesday Book ◽  
History Of

Opening the 21st anniversary of the ILP in Bradford in April 1914, J. H. Palin, one of Bradford's most prominent trade unionists, remarked: “Of ordinary historical association, Bradford has none. In Domesday Book, it is described as a waste, and the subsequent periods of capitalist exploitation have done little to improve it. […] The History of Bradford will be very largely the history of the ILP.”1 Palin's remark – unjust as it is, perhaps, to a distinguished list of Victorian philanthropists – stands as testimony to the authority and influence which the labour movement in Bradford had acquired by that date. It also provides a clue to the origins of that authority and influence, for it demonstrates the importance which he and other Bradford trade unionists attached to their association with the independent labour movement. Whatever the reactions of trade unionists in the rest of the country, in Bradford, trade unionists were vital to its success. Indeed, strong trade-union support proved to be an essential corollary of effective independent working-class political action.

The New Left and its legacies

Soundings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (74) ◽  
pp. 136-163
Author(s):  
Michael Rustin ◽  
Jeremy Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New Left ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
May Day ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Relationship Of

Mike Rustin discusses his lifelong involvement in the New Left, which began when he was still at school. He describes the history of the First New Left, including the role played within it by figures such as Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, and the role of the New Left in student politics in Oxford University, where Michael was a student and a leading member of the Labour club. He looks at the changing relationships between the New Left and the Labour Party in the 1960s and the publication of the May Day Manifesto in 1967. He also discusses the founding of the New Left Review and the transition from the time of its first editor, Stuart Hall, to that of its second, Perry Anderson, as well his two terms as a member of its editorial board, and his continuing disagreements and agreements with its editorial direction. His reflections on contemporary politics include a discussion of the relationship of New Left ideas to current movements and the Labour Party, a critique of vanguardism, and the founding of Soundings.

Class and Politics during the Depression of the 1870s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. Jentz ◽  
Richard Schneirov
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
New Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Unemployed

This chapter looks at Chicago's working class during the 1873 depression, during which all major industries experienced steep declines in revenues, and perhaps a third of the nation's workers lost their jobs. With the start of the 1873 depression, it quickly became apparent that the city's unskilled, largely immigrant working class could not be ignored. Distinctly different from the crowds during the eight-hour strike in 1867, the marches of the unemployed in December 1873 marked a new era in the history of Chicago's working class. Indeed, the December 1873 marches helped push the city's upper class into new self-awareness and political action, while crystallizing divisions between Anglo Americans and central Europeans in the Chicago labor movement.

Martyrs and Monuments of Chicago: The Haymarket Affair

Prospects ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 99-133
Author(s):  
Melissa Dabakis
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
West Side ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Forest Park ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Emma Goldman

On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown into a crowded political meeting near Haymarket Square on Chicago's west side, killing one police officer and numerous civilians. This event led to one of the fiercest attacks on anarchist dissidents in this country, culminating in an unjust trial and the execution of four innocent men. Two public monuments commemorate Chicago's famous Haymarket Affair. The Haymarket Monument (Figure 1), dedicated to the memory of eight anarchists who were tried and convicted (and later exonerated) of conspiracy charges, four of whom were executed by hanging, consists of a tall granite shaft against which stand two life-sized bronze figures, a female figure holding a laurel wreath over the head of a fallen worker. Located over their gravesite in Waldheim (now Forest Home) Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the monument has served as a site of memorial ceremonies, political meetings, and personal pilgrimages since its dedication in 1893. As an important political monument, it represents a symbol of resistance for those concerned with radical politics in general and the history of the working class in particular. Buried near and around the monument in its bucolic setting is an impressive list of historical personnages: Lucy Parsons, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Emma Goldman, to name only a few.

scholarly journals Choosing Death: Working-Class Coming of Age in Contemporary British Cinema

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 746-768 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Dave
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The Social ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Individual

Starting with Franco Moretti's hypothesis of a relationship between the experience of modernity and the coming of age narrative in the European novel, this article explores representations of the working-class Bildung in contemporary British films that can be seen as responding to social and economic changes generally associated with neoliberalism. Contrasting the emphasis on the individual negotiation of social space in the films of Danny Boyle with work from a range of directors, including Ken Loach, Penny Woolcock, Shane Meadows and Anton Corbijn, along with recent production cycles such as the football film, the article seeks to identify representations of working-class experiences, both limiting and liberating, which mark the inherently problematic attempt to imagine a successful working-class coming of age. In doing so, the article considers the usefulness of Raymond Williams’ class-inflected account of traditions of the social bond, in particular his notion of a ‘common culture’. At the same time, it examines how such representations of working-class life often emphasise the experience of class conflict, distinguished here from class struggle, and how, formally, this emphasis can result in narratives which are marked less by what Moretti describes as the ‘novelistic’, temporising structures of the classical Bildungsroman and more by the sense of crisis and trauma found in the late Bildungsroman and modern tragedy. Ultimately, the article argues for the relevance of the long view of the social history of Britain, as a pioneer culture of capitalism, in understanding these aspects of the representation of class cultures in contemporary British film.

Literary criticism as a critique of caste: Ayothee Thass and the Tamil Buddhist past

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-95
Author(s):  
Malarvizhi Jayanth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Lower Caste ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
History Of

While postcolonial studies has expanded Indian nationalist critique by considering how British literary forms reinforced imperial rule, little is known about how colonial-era Dalit writing demonstrated the bases of caste inequality. The literary criticism of Ayothee Thass (1845–1914) does so by locating the origins of untouchability in the vanquishing of Buddhism by Brahminical forces. This article draws upon issues of his Tamilan journal published between 1907 and 1914, to argue that Thass offered literary criticism as a means of destabilizing widely-accepted justifications of caste and as a basis of political action. Just as nationalists turned to the pre-colonial past to establish authority and critique colonial dominance, lower-caste intellectuals including Ayothee Thass turned to a pre-Brahminical past to assert their identity as indigenous inhabitants of the land. The little-known history of this mode of reading is crucial to understand the formation of a more inclusive public sphere in colonial India and the genealogies of twentieth-century Dalit assertion in the subcontinent.

scholarly journals The Peculiarities of English Culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-174
Author(s):  
Benjamin Noys
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
British Culture ◽  
English Culture

Abstract Francis Mulhern’s Figures of Catastrophe argues for the existence of a hitherto-unnoticed generic form: the condition of culture novel, which offers a metacultural reflection on the conditions for the existence of culture and for access to culture. Mulhern’s analysis is located within the framework of Marxist reflections on culture, the history of British cultural Marxism, and Mulhern’s own project of the critique and analysis of ‘metaculture’ in Britain. In particular, this review focuses on Mulhern’s contention that the ‘condition of culture novel’ offers a catastrophic or even nihilistic vision of the access to culture by the working class. Mulhern’s argument is that the ‘condition of culture’ novel accompanies the emergence, solidification and collapse of the British culture of ‘labourism’. This review explores the consequences of this argument for the assessment of ‘culture’ and the future of the novel as a site of reflection on the condition of culture.

Labor History and Public History: Introduction

2009 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Miller Klubock ◽  
Paulo Fontes
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Labor History ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor historians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the “Old Left,” made labor history public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party. Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the “New Left” and inspired by E.P. Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history “from the bottom up” beyond the confines of the academy, even as they shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political parties, to make the history of “ordinary people” and “everyday life” public history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while expanding the sphere of both “the public” and “labor” to include histories of women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.

Early Tudor Literary Criticism?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Stamatakis
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Practice

This article considers whether the activity that we recognize as criticism existed in the literary culture of early Tudor England. Before the appearance of formal poetic defenses and literary treatises in English (an Elizabethan phenomenon associated with Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttenham), English vernacular culture of the early sixteenth century seems to have been devoid of a fully fledged poetics or literary theory. Yet the composite evidence of printed prefaces, various endeavors to translate classical rhetorical terminology, and poetic practice itself in these early decades reveals a series of literary-critical interests that recur in the writing and intellectual history of this period. Literary theory in early Tudor England evolves as it addresses a set of preoccupations that cluster around questions of authorial inventiveness, models of style and vernacular eloquence, the domestication of imported critical terminology, and the agency of readers.

scholarly journals The Reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan: The New Left, The Making, and “Moral Economy”

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Hideo Ichihashi
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
New Left ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
National History ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis article traces the chequered history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in postwar Japan and tries to assess what kind of impact his thoughts and ideas had on the Japanese intellectual world. In so doing, this article will draw on interviews with several academics in Japan from various generations as well as written documents. The article begins with a survey of postwar left-wing politics in Japan, against which background Thompson was introduced as a New Left thinker. It also considers the National History Movement, whose problematic legacy seemed to condition the reception of The Making of the English Working Class in Japan in the 1960s. After exploring the limited reception of The Making among Japanese historians, we witness the more favourable reception of the concept of “moral economy”. The article demonstrates that the rather awkward history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan cannot be understood without referring to the postwar concerns of Japanese intellectuals, concerns that changed fairly dramatically in the course of time.

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