Rebecca Harding Davis, Tillie Olsen, and Working-Class Representation

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond A. Mazurek
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Rebecca Harding Davis ◽  
Tillie Olsen ◽  
Class Representation

“Tangled Passions”: Realism and Lyricism in the Plays of Peter Gill

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 442-457
Author(s):  
William McEvoy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
History Of ◽  
Class Representation ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

This article argues that the work of Welsh theatre director and playwright Peter Gill occupies a unique place in post-1960s’ British playwriting. It explores Gill’s plays as – using theatre critic Susannah Clapp’s phrase – the “missing link” between kitchen-sink realism and more self-consciously poetic forms of theatre text. Gill’s plays make an important contribution to the history of working-class representation in UK theatre for three main reasons: first, the centrality he gives to Wales, Welsh working-class characters, and the city of Cardiff; second, his emphasis on the experience of women, especially mothers; and third, his focus on young male characters expressing and exploring the complexities of same-sex desire. The plays make advances in terms of realist dialogue and structure while also experimenting with layout, repetition, fragmentation, poetic description, and monologue narration. Gill’s work realistically documents the impact of poverty, cramped housing conditions, and social deprivation on his characters as part of a political project to show the lives of Welsh working-class people on stage. While doing so, Gill innovates in his handling of time, perspective, viewpoint, and genre. His plays occupy a distinctive place in the history of British, working-class, gay theatre, helping us to rethink what each of these three key terms means.

scholarly journals The Ideology of Self-making and the White Working Class in Rebecca Harding Davis’ "Life in the Iron Mills"

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-68
Author(s):  
Sofía Martinicorena
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
The Self ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Rebecca Harding Davis ◽  
Economic Dynamics ◽  
Early American ◽  
White Working Class

Rebecca Harding Davis’ novella Life in the Iron Mills, published in 1861 in The Atlantic Monthly, is now considered a landmark of early American realism. This paper analyses the text’s depiction of the white working class and the ideological consequences of the myth of upward mobility and self-making, which are presented as an impossibility to Hugh Wolfe, the story’s main character. I will argue that Davis’ choice to offer a representation of the precarious lives of the workers of Northern industrial capitalism implies a criticism of the quintessentially American narrative of upward mobility, and a subsequent reflection on how foundational narratives operate in a society that is not homogeneous in terms of race or class. More specifically, I willmaintain that Life in the Iron Mills operates as a contestation to the myth of the self- made man, evinced by the comparison between Hugh Wolfe’s situation and that of the mill owners, who encourage his aspirations from an oblivious position of privilege. Lastly, Hugh’s tragic death will be taken as proof that the myth of self-making mystifies the actual social and economic dynamics of industrial capitalism.

The Knights and Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Parfitt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Local Level ◽  
National Level ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Class Representation

This chapter explores the political ventures of British and Irish Knights at a municipal and national level, and compares them with the great working-class political mobilisation that American Knights led in in the mid-1880s. It categorises the various political stances held by leading figures in the British and Irish assemblies and then charts their attempts to elect councillors and MPs, build political movements at a local level, and join political organisations set up by trade unionists to support independent labour representation. In England, and in Scotland, Knights were part of the different political traditions and ideas - working-class Liberalism, socialism, and the desire for working-class representation – that coalesced in time in the form of the British Labour Party.

scholarly journals The Condition of the Working Class: Representation and Praxis

WorkingUSA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-503
Author(s):  
Mike Wayne ◽  
Deirdre O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Representation

scholarly journals Resiting French Resistance

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 271-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. R. Kedward
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Social History ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Group Actions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Railway Workers ◽  
Class Representation ◽  
French Nation ◽  
French Resistance

Exceptions, minorities, non-conformities, individual refusals and small group actions, these are words with which historians of the French Resistance learn to live. The words allow social detail to flourish, but they stand in the way of general social conclusions and question the kind of class representation which seems so convincing in René Clément's film of the resistance of railway workers, La Bataille du rail (1946), but which cannot be sustained for the working class as a whole. Is there a social history of the Resistance? Are all generalities suspect? The French nation as a category is far too large, so is the working class, and equally so the bourgeoisie and the peasantry: it has often been argued that social and political categorisation of the Resistance is nothing but a captivating mirage, tantalising every new interpreter who sets out to give much needed structure to empirical research.

Suicide, Social Reform, and the Elision of Working-Class Resistance in Rebecca Harding Davis'sLife in the Iron Mills

Prospects ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 137-175
Author(s):  
Kevin Grauke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Environmental Determinism ◽  
Tillie Olsen ◽  
Sister Carrie ◽  
The 19Th Century

Since 1972, the year that Tillie Olsen and the Feminist Press resurrected it, Rebecca Harding Davis'sLife in the Iron Mills, which presents the tragic circumstances of the life of a Welsh furnace tender, has primarily been discussed in terms of it being an unjustly forgotten forerunner of such realist fiction of the later decades of the 19th century as Frank Norris'sMcTeague(1899) and Theodore Dreiser'sSister Carrie(1900). With its portrait of the “tragic realities of the immigrant poor, the cynicism of factory owners, [and] the brutality of working class life,” it has been widely praised for being “the earliest notable experiment of American realism,” for exemplifying a literary theory of the commonplace two decades prior to William Dean Howells's better-known theory of the same, and for dramatizing the “socioeconomic implications of environmental determinism” several years prior to Émile Zola's naturalism.

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