A History of British Working Class Literature to be Published in April 2017

A History of British Working Class Literature, edited by Laboring-Class Poets Online's own John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, will be published next month (30 April, 2017) by Cambridge University Press. The collection is available for pre-order via Cambridge's website or Amazon UK.

Cambridge's website summarizes the text as follows:

A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'; a Victorian self-improvement ethic; or as an aspect of the heroic workers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical culture. The present work contrastingly applies a wide variety of interpretive approaches to this literature. Essays on more familiar topics, such as the 'agrarian idyll' of John Clare, are mixed with entirely new areas in the field like working-class women's 'life-narratives'. This authoritative and comprehensive History explores a wide range of genres such as travel writing, the verse-epistle, the elegy and novels, while covering aspects of Welsh, Scottish, Ulster/Irish culture and transatlantic perspectives.

• Surveys three centuries of working-class literature, establishing it as a self-conscious tradition in British literature
• A wide range of writers are discussed, including many who have been only recently recovered, providing a good starting point for those interested in learning more about the field and will also reward those who know the field with additional insights and discoveries
• Includes contributions from well-regarded established scholars as well as new voices, demonstrating a wide variety of interpretive approaches that can be applied to working-class literature

Contributors include John Goodridge, Bridget Keegan, Jennie Batchelor, Jennifer Batt, William J. Christmas, Steve Van-Hagen, Gerard Carruthers, Kerri Andrews, Mary-Ann Constantine, Franca Dellarosa, Jennifer Orr, Scott McEathron, Ian Haywood, Gary Harrison, Kaye Kossick, Mike Sanders, Florence S. Boos, Kirstie Blair, Rod Hermeston, H. Gustav Klaus, Nicola Wilson, Anthony Cartwright, Sharon Ouditt, Jack Windle, Corey Gibson, Lisa Sheppard, Aidan Byrne, Cole Crawford, and Brian Maidment.