scholarly journals After Scotland's literary "Golden Age": Locating Agnes Owens

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rupert Alexander Pirie-Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Working Mother ◽  
Working Class Literature ◽  
To Come

<p>Celebrations of Scottish literature in the last decades of the twentieth century have neglected one of Scotland’s most important writers: Agnes Owens. Owens’ work and its influence is far more complex, and far greater in reach, than most accounts acknowledge. Her significance is no secret: Alasdair Gray and James Kelman have championed her work; Glasgow University’s Douglas Gifford has said that Owens “can claim to have done more than most in the redefinition of women in fiction.” This paper aims to lay the groundwork from which meaningful criticism of Agnes Owens can be realised in the 21st Century. Taking cue from Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”, particularly his argument that “the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense”, I argue that the aesthetics and politics of Owens’ work deconstruct and redefine traditional models of working-class literature and representation.  The first chapter analyses her first collection of short stories, Gentlemen of the West and its sequel novella, Like Birds in the Wilderness. I challenge the way these texts have been read as realist working-class fiction through a careful examination of her short stories and novellas, offering an alternative framework through which they can be read. Gentlemen subverts notions of societal “initiation” in working-class fiction, with Mac’s attempt to escape his community being undone by the conclusion of Birds. The second chapter is a study of three of her short stories, attending to her minimalist illustrations of the socially condemned, and her confronting exposition of the readers’ gaze. Finally, this thesis discusses the gendered landscape of her novel, A Working Mother. Using Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady as an organising text, I argue that Owens’ treatment of gender relations challenge literary notions of female “hysteria” and madness. Taken as a whole, this thesis addresses Owens’ absence, attempting to locate her work within Scottish literary criticism. It is offered as a way forward for the study of her work in years to come.</p>

scholarly journals After Scotland's literary "Golden Age": Locating Agnes Owens

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rupert Alexander Pirie-Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Working Mother ◽  
Working Class Literature ◽  
To Come

<p>Celebrations of Scottish literature in the last decades of the twentieth century have neglected one of Scotland’s most important writers: Agnes Owens. Owens’ work and its influence is far more complex, and far greater in reach, than most accounts acknowledge. Her significance is no secret: Alasdair Gray and James Kelman have championed her work; Glasgow University’s Douglas Gifford has said that Owens “can claim to have done more than most in the redefinition of women in fiction.” This paper aims to lay the groundwork from which meaningful criticism of Agnes Owens can be realised in the 21st Century. Taking cue from Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”, particularly his argument that “the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense”, I argue that the aesthetics and politics of Owens’ work deconstruct and redefine traditional models of working-class literature and representation.  The first chapter analyses her first collection of short stories, Gentlemen of the West and its sequel novella, Like Birds in the Wilderness. I challenge the way these texts have been read as realist working-class fiction through a careful examination of her short stories and novellas, offering an alternative framework through which they can be read. Gentlemen subverts notions of societal “initiation” in working-class fiction, with Mac’s attempt to escape his community being undone by the conclusion of Birds. The second chapter is a study of three of her short stories, attending to her minimalist illustrations of the socially condemned, and her confronting exposition of the readers’ gaze. Finally, this thesis discusses the gendered landscape of her novel, A Working Mother. Using Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady as an organising text, I argue that Owens’ treatment of gender relations challenge literary notions of female “hysteria” and madness. Taken as a whole, this thesis addresses Owens’ absence, attempting to locate her work within Scottish literary criticism. It is offered as a way forward for the study of her work in years to come.</p>

scholarly journals Ireland's Working-Class Literature: Neglected Themes, Amphibian Academics, and the Challenges Ahead

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-81
Author(s):  
Michael Pierse
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Working Class Literature ◽  
Societal Challenges ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Working People ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Work Songs ◽  
To Come ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry

Irish working-class history, culture, and literature are attracting increasing academic interest. With the publication of A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (2017), Declan Kiberd could write that its focus on ‘an astonishing range of writing – from work-songs and political rhymes to poetry and government reports, from novels and plays to biographies by or about working people’, would ‘set many of the terms of cultural debate in the decade to come’. This essay asks a number of timely questions in that regard: What is the likely shape of that future debate, in terms of class and culture in Ireland, and what are the lacunae that will guide research and publishing priorities for those who engage with it in academia and the arts? What has been achieved in terms of the recent scholarly inquiry into working-class writing and what are that inquiry's blindspots and limitations? The international contexts, historical breadth, categorical limitations, and institutional and societal challenges are all surveyed in this necessarily short sketch of some of the major issues.

scholarly journals The (Un)Making of a Worker Poet: The Case of Md Mukul Hossine and Migrant Worker Writings in Singapore

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Zhang Luka Lei
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Production Mode ◽  
Publication Process ◽  
Working Class Literature ◽  
Systematic Structure

This article discusses the migrant worker poet Md Mukul Hossine. Showing Mukul as the representative migrant worker poet also severely restricted and complicated his process of ‘becoming’ a poet. From a Marxist standpoint, the Singaporean literati’s dismissal of Mukul reveals the predicament of being a working-class writer in today’s neoliberal market. The particular bourgeoise ‘production mode’ of working-class literature in Singapore first ‘made’, then ‘consumed’ and ultimately ‘condemned’ Mukul. First, I examine the publication process of Mukul’s poetry and its success followed by a series of problems. In the second section, I offer a close reading of Mukul’s poems understanding Mukul’s poetics and struggles as a migrant worker poet as his poetry is seldom examined in  literary criticism. Finally, I argue that the representation of migrant workers writers such as Mukul is problematic due to the nature of the whole system: how they are empowered in such a context equally does harm to them. This mode again reproduces the systematic structure of power hegemony and social inequality through the field of literature.

scholarly journals “Under the Sway of Coal,” or a Story of the British Coal Miner Harold Heslop, Who Failed to Become a Soviet Writer

Slovene ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 482-504
Author(s):  
Elena S. Ostrovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Russian Translation ◽  
International Literature ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
International Union ◽  
Coal Miner ◽  
Working Class Literature ◽  
Red Earth

The paper focuses on the rapid and short-living Soviet writing career of the British coal miner Harold Heslop. Between 1926 and 1931, three novels by Heslop were published in the USSR (in Russian translation) and the translation of a fourth was commissioned and completed, and in 1930 the author himself travelled to the USSR as one of two members of the British delegation at the Kharkov conference of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW). However, that was the end of his success: the translated novel Red Earth was not published nor were any of his later novels. The only venue for his rare shorter essays and occasional prose excerpts was the magazine International Literature. The paper discusses this curious writer’s biography from different perspectives. It analyzes at length the critical article by Anna Elistratova, published in Na literaturnom postu and International Literature, juxtaposing the two versions and the text of Heslop’s novel to contextualize the writer and his work in the Soviet literary criticism of the time. It explores archival materials—Heslop’s correspondence with different people and institutions as well as institutional papers—to discuss the case as personal as well as institutional history, representative of the situation of the 1930s. Finally the article shifts perspective to discuss the author and his work in the context of the British working-class literature of the time.

The origins of the Catholic Social Guild in Scotland: ‘We have not attacked the Socialists professedly’

2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Potocki
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
The West ◽  
Main Activity ◽  
Social Message ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
The Catholic Church

The activities of John Wheatley's Catholic Socialist Society have been analysed in terms of liberating Catholics from clerical dictation in political matters. Yet, beyond the much-discussed clerical backlash against Wheatley, there has been little scholarly attention paid to a more constructive response offered by progressive elements within the Catholic Church. The discussion that follows explores the development of the Catholic social movement from 1906, when the Catholic Socialist Society was formed, up until 1918 when the Catholic Social Guild, an organisation founded by the English Jesuit Charles Plater, had firmly established its local presence in the west of Scotland. This organisation played an important role in the realignment of Catholic politics in this period, and its main activity was the dissemination of the Church's social message among the working-class laity. The Scottish Catholic Church, meanwhile, thanks in large part to Archbishop John Aloysius Maguire of Glasgow, became more amenable to social reform and democracy.

Les manifestes et les programmes littéraires en Afrique francophone subsaharienne : à propos de ‘l’invisibilité’ du corpus dans la critique littéraire

Literator ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laude Ngadi M
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The West ◽  
Francophone Africa ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Geographical Space

Manifestos and literary programs in French-Speaking sub-Saharian of Africa: About ‘invisibility’ of the corpus in literary criticism. Despite an abundant production, the corpus of literary manifestos and programmes from sub-Saharan Francophone Africa is relatively invisible in literary criticism. With the exception of a few studies, critical works devoted to the programmatic works of writers are rare. This article proposes some hypotheses that can explain why the body of literature of authors’ ideas in this space is generally ‘invisible’. The approach of the literary field, applied to the sociology of scientific production, makes it possible to highlight three main causes for this invisibility: the importance of identity and cultural discourse, which makes it impossible to delimit the geographical space of writers from sub-Saharan Francophone Africa, whose production and reception are dominated by that of their colleagues from the West Indies and the Caribbean; the omnipresence of political and social discourse which takes precedence over poetic reflection; the metalanguage of the manifesto due to the fact that writers are also generally literary critics.

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