British Working-Class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work

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British Fiction and the Struggle Against Work offers an account of British literary responses to work from the 1950s to the onset of the financial crisis of 2008/9. Roberto del Valle Alcal argues that throughout this period, working-class writing developed new strategies of resistance against the social discipline imposed by capitalist work. As the latter becomes an increasingly pervasive and inescapable form of control and as its nature grows abstract, diffuse, and precarious, writing about it acquires a new antagonistic quality, producing new forms of subjective autonomy and new imaginaries of a possible life beyond its purview. By tracing a genealogy of working-class authors and texts that in various ways defined themselves against the social discipline imposed by post-war capitalism, this book analyses the strategies adopted by workers in their attempts to identify and combat the source of their oppression. Drawing on the work of a wide range of theorists including Deleuze and Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, Alcal offers a systematic and innovative account of British literary treatments of work. The book includes close readings of fiction by Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Nell Dunn, Pat Barker, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Monica Ali, and Joanna Kavenna.

Reviews

Offering an analysis of working-class experience through detailed theoretical readings ... British Working-Class Fiction provides an urgent discussion of inequality and subjugation, while pointing to the possibilities of literature as a space of imaginative agency and flight. * Times Literary Supplement *
This book offers a fresh perspective on postwar British working-class fiction, drawing on the resources of the Marxist and more broadly Spinozan traditions emerging out of Italian workerism ... Alcal achieves all of this impressively. * Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism *
This is a heavily theoretically informed book, rich with references to key thinkers across the fields of literary, cultural and economic studies. [] the true strengths of the text lie in its sensitive and careful readings of canonical postwar working class texts and its frequent allusions to the agency and potential that literature offers to working class authors. [] the study does vital work in de-centering the contemporary literary canon and promoting the role of literature as imaginative and transformative weapon of struggle and refusal in the hands of the British working classes. * Journal of the English Association *

Author Bio

Roberto del Valle Alcal is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English, Uppsala University, Sweden.