Jack Windle

The title of this chapter refers to several interwoven histories: the development of literary theory and working-class literature in the 1950s and ’60s; the linked oppression of working-class and (post)colonial people through the modern era; the thread of materialism that stiches these histories into an important and distinctive literary tradition and connects them to wider contemporary discourses within and beyond literary criticism and theory. The aim of the discussion is to begin to articulate a literary-theoretical position that might – in the same vein as postcolonial and feminist theory – recover and revive working-class literature and challenge criticism to pay this important tradition the attention and respect it deserves.

This chapter offers new readings of Sam Selvon and Tony Harrison, two writers whose lives were shaped by the processes of post-war decolonization and whose work emerges from - and tackles directly - the legacy of British colonialism. These readings are contextualized through brief examinations of twentieth-century responses to immigration and racism in working-class literature and of contemporary interdisciplinary and mainstream debates about racism and class in Britain. By historicizing their respective formations as working-class writers and offering new readings of critically misrepresented elements of their work, the discussion aims to reposition Selvon as an important figure in the post-war history of British working-class literature and to argue that Harrison is a working-class writer whose work can only be fully appreciated with the aid of a postcolonial perspective. The discussion will suggest ways in which criticism of working-class literature might productively engage with other critical discourses and, in doing so, resist the division and vilification of the working class in contemporary society.

Abstract
This article discusses representations of gender in working-class literature to
examine the ways in which writers embrace, subvert, complicate, and otherwise
engage with stereotypically gendered identities. Invoking Richard Hoggart, it
begins with a brief autoethnographic note setting out my own gender and
class formation in order to foreground my positionality in relation to the texts
and issues covered. Tony Blackshaw’s history of ‘the Inbetweener generation’
born in the late 1920s and 1930s is used to set out the social and historical
context of the discussion. A brief feminist reading of Walter Greenwood’s
influential classic Love on the Dole (1933) follows in order to contextualise
representations of gender in the working-class literature of the mid-twentieth
century. The discussion then moves on to the problematically gendered labels
used to categorise many texts from the ‘golden age of working-class literature’
in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Readings of Room at the Top (1957), A Taste of
Honey (1958), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and A Kind of Loving
(1960) reveal the sophisticated subterfuge that characterises these writers’
engagements with marriage, toxic masculinity, and male vulnerability in the
period. These readings are used to argue that the gendered labels – ‘Angry
Young Men’ and ‘kitchen sink’ – applied to these writers and their texts are
unhelpful and contribute towards misinterpretations emerging from the
social, cultural, and geographical distance of many critics from the producers,
intended consumers, and real-life inspirations for working-class literature.
The final section examines Tony Harrison’s transition from unreconstructed
pre-feminist consciousness in his earliest poetry to a materialist poetics. The
conclusion will show that re-reading working-class texts with greater sensitivity
to their nuanced representations of gender can reveal hidden depths and new
dimensions that can further our understanding of the working-class canon of
the twentieth century.

This paper will examine Mather’s radical ballads as documents of performance and repositories of Sheffield heritage. Mather could read but not write and his songs therefore occupy the threshold between oral and written working-class cultures and suggest ways in which they intersect and mutually constitute each other. Through an analysis of the songs in their historical contexts and by examining the histories of their recording and performance, the paper will argue for their importance to an understanding of Sheffield’s working-class heritage and the tradition of dissenting lyrics and performance they inaugurated. The paper will also invite suggestions for ways to consider the possible contemporary performativity of Mather’s songs and elements of his life.

Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) blends Standard and Caribbean Englishes to create a hybrid literary idiom which articulates the oral culture and dialects of Windrush generation immigrants in London. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) similarly attempts to set the author’s Nottingham dialect alongside Standard English, challenging the capacity of the novel to articulate working-class consciousness. In these novels, dialect forms a challenge to the dominance of Standard English in literature and suggests the opening out of the form to articulate and represent a greater plurality of lived experience. Immigrants and the working class – groups historically marginalised in society and in the novel – were of central importance to Britain’s post-war recovery: in their sophisticated interplay of dialect and Standard English, these authors enact the realignment of British society in the fifties and subtly argue for the accommodation of marginalised groups within the cultural centre. Using Cairns Craig’s equation of dialect and dialectic alongside Homi Bhabha’s notions of mimicry and hybridity, this paper will assert the political significance of Selvon and Silltoe’s uses of dialect. It will also argue that dialect forms a productive area of commonality between texts usually categorised separately – in this case as ‘immigrant’/ ‘black’ writing and ‘working-class’ writing – and therefore helps to interrogate literary-critical categorisation itself.