Common people: working-class writing in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Taking Kit de Waal’s 2019 Common People anthology as an exemplar of significant intervention in the field, this thesis seeks to ‘reclaim and redefine’ British working-class writing for the early twenty-first century. It identifies what is new about working-class representation in literature in post-millennial times, following a period of profound social, political, and economic change and a radical reshaping of class relations in Britain, and amid a renewed interest in class in culture and society. Using a textual analysis approach alongside data from interviews and surveys with selected case study authors, the research examines how and why writers are representing working-class experience, which is part of the wider issue of their under-representation in the literary and publishing industries. This is a major problem in Britain today in terms of not only social justice but also the creative and economic potential of the country’s cultural output.

Common People signals the need, paradoxically, to go beyond the ‘work’ in our understanding of working-class writing in the early twenty-first century. Despite the terms of its category, these writings often foreground the spheres of life where people are away from work, for example at leisure or at home. This thesis shows how and why contemporary working-class writers are questioning their association with urban, industrial environments, making visible the lives and the labour of a rural working class who have largely not been represented in cultural narratives, while also insisting that a diversity of people must have access to the land and the literature of the countryside. It explores a continued ‘feminisation’ of working-class writing in the shift away from an understanding of class experience that pivots around the masculine sphere of industrialised labour. Developing the motif of the border in working-class literature and criticism historically, it also examines the concept of the edgeland, which is an expanding feature of the physical and cultural geography of Britain in the post-millennial period. A greater emphasis on the pleasurable aspects of working-class life in the anthology and beyond is considered against the evolution of working-class anger, particularly in relation to the writings of the ‘new angry young men’. Across the thesis, these writings are explored as expressions of working-class identity that is both collective and individual, personal and political.

Date of Award	23 May 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Katy Shaw (Supervisor)