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.
Author(s): Robin Harriott
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 299
City: Cham
Archives
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction: ‘They at Least Were Not Hybrids’
A Multiplicity in Unity: The Birmingham Writers and Their City
Shaping Influences: Finding the Exotic in the Everyday
‘Going Over’: The Cultural Diaspora
‘At last the British are Coming’: Prevailing and Contemporary Critiques of Working-Class Literature
The Ethnographic Turn
Chapter 2: This Working Life: Work and the Workplace
A Fellow Traveller? Henry Green: Birmingham’s Adoptive Proletarian
Walter Allen: ‘As a Film Director might present it’: Blind Man’s Ditch
‘As Unpolitical a Man as I Have Ever Met’: Leslie Halward
Leslie Halward: ‘Belcher’s Hod’
Chapter 3: Feeling the Pinch: Unemployment
A Qualitative Deficit: Filling the Statistical Gap
Walter Brierley: Frustration and Bitterness: A Colliery Banksman
Walter Brierley: Means Test Man
John Hampson: ‘Man About the House’
Walter Allen: Innocence Is Drowned
Chapter 4: Writing Their Selves: Authorial Subjectivity and Representation in Birmingham Group Narrative
A Reluctant Collier? Walter Brierley: ‘Body’
Walter Brierley: Sandwichman
Leslie Halward: ‘A Broken Engagement’
Peter Chamberlain: An Eavesdropper’s Secrets: ‘Mr. Marris’ Reputation’ and ‘What the Hell?’
John Hampson: Saturday Night at the Greyhound
Chapter 5: Conclusion
Coda: Dispersal
The Legacy
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index
