Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Class, Culture, Politics
Part One: Mapping Deindustrialisation
Chapter One: David Peace and the Strike Novel: Conflict, History, Knowledge
Chapter Two: Gordon Burn and Working-Class Nostalgia: Region, Form, Commodification
Chapter Three: Anthony Cartwright and the Deindustrial Novel: Realism, Place, Class
Part Two: Resisting Demonisation
Chapter Four: Ross Raisin and Class Mourning: Masculinity, Work, Precarity
Chapter Five: Jenni Fagan and the Revolting Class: Gender, Stigma, Resistance
Chapter Six: Sunjeev Sahota and the Racialised Worker: Class, Race, Violence
Conclusion: Class Matters
