Class War: A Literary History

(Paperback)

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We live in an age of class war. Rising inequality and the ever-increasing stakes of our brutal economic divide serve as constant reminders of this conflict. But this is no modern phenomena. Class war has been the foundation of capitalism since its inception, yet its history is often submerged beneath the narratives of progress and enlightenment, a history so often written by its victors. In Class War, Mark Steven traces the history of the concept from the plantations of Haiti to Black Lives Matter, in the process brilliantly weaving together literature and politics to retell the story of those whose struggles have so often been forgotten. A bracing and lucid work that combines narrative history and literary analysis, Steven moves from the global centres of capitalism to the peripheries, traversing the struggles of working people from the French Revolution to the anticolonial struggles in Asia, Latin America and Africa and beyond. In doing so, Class War charts the making and unmaking of social class through armed insurrection and revolutionary combat while also offering an original and penetrating reading of the literature of revolution, a collection of texts that has done so much to shape our understanding of the class war: from the poetry of Shelley and Keats and the novels of Emile Zola and Jack London, through to Frantz Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

Reviews

A survey of the literature of revolution, Mark Steven's history of global class war considers work by writers from Byron to Assata Shakur. It feels more crucial than ever to study the work of writers who practiced solidarity, and this book promises to be a vital contribution to the revolutionary canon. * Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2023 *
Class war is everywhere and in every era. And yet it is not in all places and times the same; it is the stuff of history, and history is what changes. In any regard it is war, and there will be no chance of winning if we do not reckon carefully with its transformations into the present and along the branching paths of the future. It is this movement, a real movement, that Mark Steven sets out to capture, making use of literature's necessary capacity for figuring both the broadest and most delicate social formations in motion. Here he offers a crystallography of veiled relations; there he summons the most explicit jeremiads. Louverture to LeGuin, this book is a wonder in its reach and attention, breathing vitality into core concepts while outmaneuvering the staid orthodoxies hobbling all too much class discourse in the 21st century. Like all the best history: a way forward. -- Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot
Beautifully written and conceived, Class War is a history as absorbing as any nineteenth-century novel. Part literary criticism, part political theory, part polemic, it is also an act of recovery; Steven has written a necessary book. -- Anahid Nersessian, author of Keats's Odes: A Lovers Discourse

Author Bio

Mark Steven is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (2017) and Splatter Capital (2017).