Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T17:02:13.789Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

LITERATURE FROM BELOW: RADICALISM AND POPULAR FICTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

Greg Vargo
Greg Vargo*
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In The Poetry of Chartism (2009), Mike Sanders describes the temptation which confronts literary scholars of working-class and radical political movements to present their endeavors as “archival work [of] discovery, a bringing to light of long forgotten artefacts” (36). Such posture, though dramatic, is unwarranted in Sanders's view because a critical tradition beginning in the late nineteenth century has continued to republish, analyze, and appreciate the writing of Chartist poets. Yet, if the temptation persists (for students of radical poetry and fiction alike), it does so for reasons beyond the difficulties inherent in accessing literature printed in ephemeral newspapers by movements which suffered state persecution. New generations of scholars must “discover” the radical corpus anew because in a profound sense this corpus has not been integrated into broader literary history but has remained a separate tradition, found and lost again and again.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 439 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CONSIDERED

Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1957.Google Scholar
Altick, Richard. Victorian Studies in Scarlet. New York: Norton, 1970.Google Scholar
Brake, Laurel, Bell, Bill, and Finkelstein, David, eds. Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Breton, Rob. “Diverting the Drunkard's Path: Chartist Temperance Narratives.” Victorian Literature and Culture 41.1 (2013): 139–52.Google Scholar
Breton, Rob. “Ghosts in the Machina: Plotting in Chartist and Working Class Fiction.” Victorian Studies 47.4 (2005): 555–75.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. “Model Prisons.” Latter-Day Pamphlets. 1850. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Crone, Rosalind. Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. “Deconstructing the Popular.” People's History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Samuel, Raphael. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–40.Google Scholar
Haywood, Ian. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, and the People. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Haywood, Ian, ed. Chartist Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.Google Scholar
Haywood, Ian, ed. Chartist Fiction: Ernest Jones, Women's Wrongs. AldershotAshgate, 2001.Google Scholar
Haywood, Ian, ed. The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction. Brookfield: Scolar, 1995.Google Scholar
Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Humpherys, Anne, and James, Louis, eds. G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.Google Scholar
James, Louis. Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England. New York: Oxford UP, 1963.Google Scholar
John, Juliet. Dickens and Mass Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Ledger, Sally. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Loose, Margaret A.The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Sanders, Mike. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Sen, Sambudha. London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Thompson, Dorothy. “Who were ‘the People’ in 1842?” Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison. Ed. Chase, Malcolm and Dyck, Ian. Brookfield: Scolar P, 1996. 118–32.Google Scholar
Vanden Bossche, Chris. Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1960.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. “Radical and/or Respectable.” The Press We Deserve. Ed. Boston, RichardLondon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. 14–26.Google Scholar