Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiographies, 1820-1848

Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiographies, 1820-1848
ISBN-10
1604978457
ISBN-13
9781604978452
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
234
Language
English
Published
2013
Author
Cassandra Falke

Description

Viewing all of these stories together, Falke captures the richness of working-class culture, the bravery of these authors' persistence, and the fecundity of their literary imaginations. Literature by the Working Class proposes a way to read working-class autobiographies that attends to both the socio-historical influences on their composition and their value as individual literary works. Although social historians, reading historians, and historians of rhetoric have recognized the significance of working-class autobiography to the early nineteenth century, providing broad overviews of the genre, very little work has been done to read these works as literature. Part of this negligence arises for the style of these autobiographies. They reject notions of autonomous selfhood and linear self-creation that characterize other Romantic period autobiographical works.

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