 | The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction: Deindustrialisation, Demonisation, Resistance Subjects: Language & Literature; Social Sciences; Literature; Sociology & Social Policy; Social Class; Interdisciplinary Literary Studies; Literature by Geographic Area; Literature by Period; The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction looks at how the twenty-first-century British novel has explored contemporary working-class life. Studying the works of David Peace, Gordon Burn, Anthony Cartwright, Ross Raisin, Jenni Fagan, and Sunjeev Sahota, the book shows how they have mapped the shift from deindustrialisation through to stigmatization of individuals and communities who have experienced profound levels of destabilization and unemployment. O'Brien argues that these novels offer ways of understanding fundamental aspects of contemporary capitalism for the working class in modern Britain, including, class struggle, inequality, trauma, social abjection, racism, and stigmatization, exclusively looking at British working-class literature of the twenty-first century. Phil O'Brien has written on working-class fiction and theatre for Textual Practice and Literature & History and in Accelerated Times: British Literature in Transition (Cambridge University Press) and Working-Class Writing: Theory & Practice (Palgrave). He is secretary of the Raymond Williams Society, on the editorial board of Key Words , and editor of Culture & Politics (Verso) by Raymond Williams. He has taught at the University of Manchester and Liverpool John Moores University. This is his first book. |
