The Birmingham Group
Reading the Second City in the 1930s
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Beschreibung
The focus of this study is the collective of writers known variously as the Birmingham Group, the Birmingham School or the Birmingham Proletarian Writers who were active in the City of Birmingham in the decade prior to the Second World War. Their narratives chronicle the lived-experience of their fellow citizens in the urban manufacturing centre which had by this time become Britain’s second city. Presumed ‘guilty by association’ with a working-class literature considered overtly propagandistic, formally conservative, or merely the naive emulation of bourgeois realism, their narratives have in consequence suffered undue critical neglect. This book repudiates such assertions by arguing that their works not only contrast markedly with other examples of working-class writing produced in the 1930s but also prove themselves responsive to recent critical assessments seeking a more holistic and intersectional approach to issues of working-class identity.
The focus of this study is the collective of writers known variously as the Birmingham Group, the Birmingham School or the Birmingham Proletarian Writers who were active in the City of Birmingham in the decade prior to the Second World War. Their narratives chronicle the lived-experience of their fellow citizens in the urban manufacturing centre which had by this time become Britain’s second city. Presumed ‘guilty by association’ with a working-class literature considered overtly propagandistic, formally conservative, or merely the naive emulation of bourgeois realism, their narratives have in consequence suffered undue critical neglect. This book repudiates such assertions by arguing that their works not only contrast markedly with other examples of working-class writing produced in the 1930s but also prove themselves responsive to recent critical assessments seeking a more holistic and intersectional approach to issues of working-class identity.
First extended study to explore the Birmingham Group, a collective of working-class writers active in the 1930s Challenges negative critiques of working-class literature, instead highlighting the unique contribution of these authors Shows how the Birmingham Group engaged with the intersections of class with gender, sexual and ethnic identities
Autor*in
Robin Harriott
Themen in »The Birmingham Group«
British and Irish Literature Literature and Class Literature and the Environment Working class Birmingham Proletarian Writers Interwar period Realism Walter Allen John Hampson Leslie Halward Walter Brierley Peter Chamberlain British manufacturing 1930s literature
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“Harriott's groundbreaking study of the 1930s Birmingham Group of writers is an essential contribution to the ongoing critical redefinition and revaluation of working-class writing as inherently heterogeneous and intersectional.”
—Nick Hubble, Professor of Modern and Contemporary English, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UK
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