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.

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 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>

Veiled Theory: The Transmutation of Anthropology in T. S. Eliot's Critical Method

Paragraph ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Trexler
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Human History ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Historical Moment

While literary criticism is often seen as an unself-reflective forerunner to literary theory, this article argues that T.S. Eliot's theory of critical practice was a philosophically informed methodology of reading designed to create a disciplinary and institutional framework. To reconstruct this theory, it enriches theoretical methodology with intellectual and institutional history. Specifically, the article argues that Eliot's early critical theory depended on the paradigms of anthropology and occultism, developed during his philosophical investigation of anthropology and Leibniz. From this investigation, Eliot created an occult project that used spiritual monads as facts to progress toward the Absolute. The article goes on to argue that Eliot's methodology of reading was shaped by anthropology's and occultism's paradigms of non-academic, non-specialist reading societies that sought a super-historic position in human history through individual progress. The reconstruction of Eliot's intellectual and institutional framework for reading reveals a historical moment with sharp differences and surprising similarities to the present.

scholarly journals Them and Uz: Harrison and me

2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. M. Francis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
Class Culture

The working-class writer, having moved into a middle-class dominated field, often feels alienated from their old and new cultures – separated as they are from their heritage and not quite grounded in the new elite circle. The markers of working-class culture are much harder to define in our hyper-modern situation, and this exacerbates the alienation. This position opens up possibilities in perception and expression from those in the margins and off-kilter positions. Tracing the multivoiced qualities of Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ and R. M. Francis’s poetics, alongside biographical and autobiographical details, this hybrid article argues that off-kilter and outcast voices, like those in the aforementioned class liminality, are in the best place to explore and discuss the difficult to navigate cultures, communities and identities. This fusion of personal essay, poetry and literary criticism considers the unusual, marginal and liminal positioning of working-class writers, researchers and academics.

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