British Industrial Fictions

This volume represents the contexts, aspirations and dramas experienced by the people who worked in industry in Britain for 200 years. This fictional material was usually produced in conscious resistance to the dominent culture of the day, sometimes by middle-class sympathisers, but often by workers themselves who found time, somehow, to write about their stark experiences. Some of the essays in this collection discuss little-known aspects of industrial fiction, such as the early fiction about seamstresses, indutrial writing by women authors, the largely unknown representations of ship-builders, 19th-century nail-workers and late 20th-century unemployed. Other essays reconsider well known major authors and periods such as Robert Tressell, James Hanley, Alan Sillitoe, Lewis Jones, the literature of the 1926 strike and some essays look at structural features of industrial writing such as the relation between fiction and industrial accidents in the 19th century, the literary patterns of 30s writing, and the ways in which a particular area - Middlesborough - has been represented and not represented through industrial writing.