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PROLETARIAN NOVEL (SOCIALIST REALISM IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN)
[WORKING-CLASS NOVEL]
If the novel is the most important literary genre through which the European bourgeoisie has explored its own class identity and expressed its collective vision of the world, it is also the case that the novel has been one of the most important literary vehicles for the expression of antibourgeois positions. Indeed, proletarian novels (which one might roughly define as those that represent the position of workers as the class antagonists of the ruling bourgeoisie) have a long and rich history in both Britain and the United States. In Britain, novels that might be considered proletarian (or at least antibourgeois) in their orientation go back as far as William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), although Godwin's essentially anarchist position lacks any real proletarian class consciousness. Even though the rudiments of a critique of capitalism may be found in the works of bourgeois Victorian novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Dickens, such writers remained highly antagonistic to the idea of working-class political action. The 19th-century US novel contains similar gestures toward a literature of the working class. Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills (written 1861, published 1972) is a notable example, and even Hermann Melville's venerable Moby-Dick (1851), with its cast of mostly working-class characters, might be considered the first US proletarian novel.
Nevertheless, the 19th-century roots of leftist culture are far deeper and stronger in Britain than in the United States. As E. P. Thompson points out in his monumental work The Making of the English Working Class (1963), English working-class culture developed in vibrant and dynamic ways during the 19th century. Workers sought, within the confusion of the sweeping social transformations associated with the Industrial Revolution, to establish a viable cultural identity for themselves as individuals and as a class. Nevertheless, working-class culture remained an essentially marginal phenomenon, promulgated through informal channels and generally set in stark opposition to an official English culture that tended to represent workers in negative and stereotypical ways. Indeed, the more workers sought to seize control of their lives, the more they became the objects of fear and loathing in the official English press-and in English literature. The Chartist movement of 1837 to...