The Working Class in Mid Twentieth-Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory. By Ben Jones.

AbstractThis article explores the life and commemoration of Buck Alec Robinson. A feared loyalist killer in 1920s Belfast, in more recent times he has featured as a lion-keeping “character” on wall murals and in tourist guide books. Robinson is employed as a case study to investigate two separate but, in this case, interlinked historiographical debates. The first involves Norbert Elias's analysis of the decline of violence. The second relates to discussion of the analysis of social memory in working-class communities, with violence being placed therein. The article supports historical assessments suggesting that the “civilizing offensive” had an uneven impact. That point is usually made in the context of working-class men. This article extends it to political elites in Belfast and probes their flirtations with violent hard men. The case is made that it is a mistake to assume the “civilizing” dynamic is to be understood as a teleological or top-down process.

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The Strange Radicalism of Thomas Carnduff and St John Ervine

10.1093/oso/9780198791591.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Connal Parr

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Working Class ◽

First World War ◽

Class Consciousness ◽

World War ◽

Abbey Theatre ◽

Unpublished Work ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

The First World War ◽

First World

St John Ervine and Thomas Carnduff were born in working-class Protestant parts of Belfast in the 1880s, though Ervine would escape to an eventually prosperous existence in England. Orangeism, the politics of early twentieth-century Ireland, the militancy of the age—and the involvement of these writers in it—along with Ervine’s journey from ardent Fabian to reactionary Unionist, via his pivotal experiences managing the Abbey Theatre and losing a leg in the First World War, are all discussed. Carnduff’s own tumultuous life is reflected through his complicated Orange affiliation, gut class-consciousness, poetry, unpublished work, contempt for the local (and gentrified) Ulster artistic scene, and veneration of socially conscious United Irishman James Hope. It concludes with an assessment of their respective legacies and continuing import.

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"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

Widok. Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej - Siła kobiet ◽

10.36854/widok/2021.31.2439 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Adri Kácsor

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Working Class ◽

Visual Culture ◽

Upper Class ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Political Propaganda ◽

Political Transformations ◽

The Rich ◽

Soviet Russia ◽

Interwar Europe

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

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Late Twentieth-Century Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Sects and Cults: Weston La Bare, Norman Cohn, & E. P. Thompson

International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation ◽

10.54208/ooo1/1002 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 29-46

Author(s):

Stephen Kent

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Native American ◽

Working Class ◽

Class Consciousness ◽

Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽

Ghost Dance ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Religious Sects ◽

Late Twentieth Century

Before the diminished influence of classical psychoanalysis in the late twentieth century, several now-classic studies of sectarian religions contained Freudian psychoanalytic perspectives on religious sects or cults. These studies included Weston La Barre’s analyses of both serpent handlers and the Native American Ghost Dance; Norman Cohn’s panoramic examination of medieval European sectarian apocalyptic movements; and E. P. Thompson’s groundbreaking examination of Methodism within the formation of English working-class consciousness. Regardless of the problems that are endemic to the application of Freudian psychoanalysis to history, the sheer (although sometimes flawed) erudition of these three authors suggests that classical psychoanalysis had an important interpretive role to play in the study of some sectarian and cultic groups.

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Ugliness and Beauty: the Politics of Landscape in Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x13000043 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 35-47

Author(s):

Claire Warden

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Working Class ◽

The Other ◽

Surrounding Area ◽

North West ◽

Avant Garde ◽

The North ◽

The One ◽

The University ◽

Open Fields

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.

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