Proletarian literature
Proletarian literature refers here to the literature created by left-wing writers mainly for the class-conscious proletariat. Though the Encyclopædia Britannica states that because it "is essentially an intended device of revolution", it is therefore often published by the Communist Party or left-wing sympathizers, the proletarian novel has also been categorized without any emphasis on revolution, as a novel "about the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the intention of making propaganda". This different emphasis may reflect a difference between Russian, American and other traditions of working-class writing, with that of Britain. The British tradition was not especially inspired by the Communist Party, but had its roots in the Chartist movement, and socialism, amongst others. Furthermore, writing about the British working-class writers, H Gustav Klaus, in The Socialist Novel: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition suggested that "the once current 'proletarian' is, internationally, on the retreat, while the competing concepts of 'working-class' and 'socialist' continue to command about equal adherence".
The word proletarian is also used to describe works about the working class by working-class authors, to distinguish them from works by middle-class authors such as Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, and Henry Green. Similarly, though some of poet William Blake's works are early examples of working-class literature, including the two "The Chimney Sweeper" poems, published in Songs of Innocence in 1789 and Songs of Experience in 1794, which deal with the subject of child labour, Blake, whose father was a tradesman, was not a proletarian writer.
Proletarian novel
The proletariat are members of the working class. The proletarian novel is a subgenre of the novel, written by workers mainly for other workers. It overlaps and sometimes is synonymous with the working-class novel, socialist novel, social problem novel, propaganda or thesis novel, and socialist realism novel.The proletarian novel may comment on political events, systems and theories, and is frequently seen as an instrument to promote social reform or political revolution among the working classes. Proletarian literature is created especially by communist, socialist, and anarchist authors. It is about the lives of poor, and the period 1930 to 1945 in particular produced many such novels. However, there were works before and after these dates. In Britain the term working class literature, novel etc. is more generally used. The intention of the writers of proletarian literature is to lift the workers from the slums, by inspiring them to embrace the possibilities of social change or a political revolution.
By country
Australia
Australian authors who have contributed to proletarian literature have typically been affiliated with the Communist Party of Australia or the Australian Labor Party. Some prominent proletarian fiction authors include Frank Hardy and David Ireland.France
Two leading French writers who were born into the working class were Jean Giono and Henry Poulaille.Jean Giono was the son of a cobbler and a laundry woman, who spent most of his life in Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. He was a voracious reader but had to leave school at sixteen to work in a bank to help support his family. He published his first novel Colline in 1929, which won him the Prix Brentano and $1000, and an English translation of the book, he left the bank in 1930 to devote himself to writing on a full-time basis.
The novels Giono published during the nineteen-thirties are set in Provence, with peasants as protagonists, and displaying a pantheistic view of nature. Marcel Pagnol based three of his films on Giono's work of this period: Regain, with Fernandel and music by Honegger, Angèle, and La Femme du boulanger, with Raimu.
After World War II he planned on writing a sequence of ten novels inspired by Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, in which he would depict characters from all strata of society rather than peasants, and contrast different moments in history by depicting the experiences of members of the same family a hundred years apart. But Giono only completed the four Hussard novels, Mort d’un personnage ), Le Hussard sur le Toit, Le Bonheur fou, Angelo.
Henry Poulaille was the son of a carpenter and cane worker, who was orphaned at fourteen. In addition to writing novels Poulaille was active in encouraging working class writing in France from the 1930s. He is the author of numerous novels, essays on the cinema, literature, and popular traditions. Amongst the novels that he wrote are autobiographical works: There were four ; Daily Bread ; The Wretched of the Earth ; Soldier of Pain ; The Survivors: Soldier of Pain 2 ; Alone in life to 14 years. In these novels, based on his own life, Poulaiile depicts a working-class family, the Magneux.
Great Britain
19th century
Poet John Clare was an important early British working-class writer. Clare was the son of a farm labourer, and came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self".A mid-Victorian example of a working-class novel is chartist Thomas Martin Wheeler's Sunshine and Shadows, which was serialized in the Northern Star 1849–50. Another chartist writer was the shoemaker poet Thomas Cooper, who, while in prison for making an inflammatory speech, "followed in the footsteps of Bunyan and other radicals and wrote imaginatively about the themes of oppression and emancipation".
20th century
's Love on the Dole has been described as an "excellent example" of an English proletarian novel. It was written during the early 1930s as a response to the crisis of unemployment, which was being felt locally, nationally, and internationally. It is set in Hanky Park, the industrial slum in Salford where Greenwood was born and brought up. The story begins around the time of the General Strike of 1926, but its main action takes place in 1931.Several working-class writers wrote about their experience of life in the merchant navy, including James Hanley, Jim Phelan, George Garrett, and John Sommerfield. Liverpool-Irish writer James Hanley wrote a number of works based on his experiences at sea as well as a member of a working-class seafaring family. An early example is the novella The Last Voyage, in which stoker John Reilly, who is still working only because he lied about his age, now faces his last voyage. Although Reilly is in his mid-sixties he has a young family, who will have to live in future on his inadequate pension. In another sense this is Reilly's last voyage, because despairing of the future he throws himself into the ship's furnace: “Saw all his life illuminated in those flames. ‘Not much for us. Sweat, sweat. Pay off. Sign on. Sweat, sweat. Pay off. Finish. Ah, well!’” Among other works by Hanley are Boy and The Furys.
There were a number of Welsh writers who wrote works based on their experiences as coal miners, including novelist Jack Jones, B.L. Coombes, novelists Gwyn Thomas. Lewis Jones, and Gwyn Jones, and poet Idris Davies. Jack Jones was a miner's son from Merthyr Tydfil who was himself a miner from the age of 12. He was active in the union movement and politics, starting with the Communist Party, but in the course of his life he was involved, to some degree, with all the major British parties. Amongst his novels of working-class life are Rhondda Roundabout and Bidden to the Feast. Bert Coombes came from Herefordshire to Resolven in south Wales as a teenager, where he spent the rest of his life, working as a miner for 40 years. Among his works, the autobiographical These Poor Hands is the classic account of life as a miner in south Wales. The political development of a young miner is the subject of Cwmardy, Lewis Jones's largely autobiographical novel. Gwyn Thomas was also a coalminer's son from the Rhondda, but won a scholarship to Oxford and then became a schoolmaster. He wrote 11 novels as well as short stories, plays, and radio and television scripts, most of which focused on unemployment in the Rhondda Valley in the 1930s. Thomas's first accepted book was a collection of short stories, Where Did I Put My Pity: Folk-Tales From the Modern Welsh, which appeared in 1946. Another writer who escaped from his proletarian background was Gwyn Jones. He wrote about this world in novels and short stories, including Times Like These which explores the life of a working-class family during the 1926 miners' strike. The mining valleys produced a significant working-class poet in Idris Davies, who worked as a coal miner before qualifying as a teacher. Davies was a Welsh speaker but wrote primarily in English. His works include a few poems in Welsh. Gwalia Deserta is about the Great Depression, while the subject of The Angry Summer is the 1926 miners' strike. Ron Berry, son of Rhondda collier who worked underground himself, produced novels and short stories rooted in the Welsh working class. Rhys Davies, author of A Time To Laugh, and Menna Gallie, author of Strike for a Kingdom and The Small Mine, while not working class, also wrote about life in the mining valleys of South Wales. Novelist and poet Christopher Meredith, the son of a steelworker and former coalminer and formerly a steelworker himself, writes out of Welsh working class experience, especially in his novel Shifts, set in the 1970s against the decline of the steel industry, and in most of the short stories of Brief Lives.
Harold Heslop, author of the novel The Earth Beneath was another coal miner, but from the north-east of England, as was Sid Chaplin, who wrote The Thin Seam.
Both Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving, were working class writers associated with the so-called Angry young men; they were also linked with Kitchen sink realism, a literary movement that used a style of social realism. This often depicted the domestic situations of working class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies. However, some of the writers also associated with these two movements, like John Osborne and John Braine, did not come from the working-class.
The following are some other important twentieth-century British working class novelists and novels: Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists ; James C. Welsh, The Underworld ; Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, This Slavery ; Ellen Wilkinson, Clash ; Lionel Britton, Hunger and Love ; Lewis Grassic Gibbon A Scots Quair ; Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave ; William McIlvanney, Docherty ; Pat Barker, Union Street ; James Kelman, The Busconductor Hines ; Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting.
Edward Bond is an important working-class dramatist and his play Saved became one of the best known cause célèbres in 20th century British theatre history. Saved delves into the lives of a selection of South London working class youths suppressed – as Bond would see it – by a brutal economic system and unable to give their lives meaning, who drift eventually into barbarous mutual violence.