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LITERATURE FROM BELOW: RADICALISM AND POPULAR FICTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

Greg Vargo
Greg Vargo*
Affiliation:
New York University
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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 

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References

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