Suchergebnisse

--

Throughout the 1930s, the impact of fascism on the role of women in society and in the family was the focus of several anti-fascist novels written by women. In this article I concentrate on three of the most significant and successful of these works in order to explore the way they dramatize the relationship between collaboration with and resistance to fascism. I show how they not only viewed the reactionary transformation of the state by fascist regimes as a historic defeat for women. They also sought to depict the effect this catastrophe had on their personal lives and how they coped with its social and political challenges. I have therefore selected the following novels – Storm Jameson's In the Second Year (1936), Murray Constantine's (Katharine Burdekin) Swastika Night (1937) and Phyllis Bottome's The Mortal Storm (1938), since they address the fundamentally regressive nature of fascism in different ways as well as individual struggles against it. Moreover, they remain outstanding examples of anti-fascist fiction that still resonate with us today when the world is once more faced with the rise of rightwing, populist and neofascist parties.

Throughout the 1930s, the impact of fascism on the role of women in society and in the family was the focus of several anti-fascist novels written by women. In this article I concentrate on three of the most significant and successful of these works in order to explore the way they dramatize the relationship between collaboration with and resistance to fascism. I show how they not only viewed the reactionary transformation of the state by fascist regimes as a historic defeat for women. They also sought to depict the effect this catastrophe had on their personal lives and how they coped with its social and political challenges. I have therefore selected the following novels – Storm Jameson's In the Second Year (1936), Murray Constantine's (Katharine Burdekin) Swastika Night (1937) and Phyllis Bottome's The Mortal Storm (1938), since they address the fundamentally regressive nature of fascism in different ways as well as individual struggles against it. Moreover, they remain outstanding examples of anti-fascist fiction that still resonate with us today when the world is once more faced with the rise of rightwing, populist and neofascist parties.

In this article, I explore some of the key political and aesthetic concerns of Victor Serge's novel, Midnight in the Century (1939), about the life of Left Oppositionists in one of the many stalinist penal colonies in the Urals. Not only does this novel represent one of the most ambitious early attempts to document the deportation and exile of these revolutionaries, it also dramatizes their rearguard resistance to the stalinist betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution. The novel is also situated in the context of the debate about the radical literary movements within the Soviet Union with which Serge felt himself fully identified.

Raymond Williams remains, thirty years after his death, one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary cultural studies. What is perhaps less known is that throughout his life he also devoted himself to the writing of novels: Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964), The Fight for Manod (1969), The Volunteers (1978), Loyalties (1985), People of the Black Mountains: The Beginning (1986), and People of the Black Mountains: The Eggs of the Eagle (1990). In his career as a novelist, Williams returned repeatedly to the complex theme of a Welsh social and geographical diaspora. Within this narrative context, Williams consciously sought to break with the conventional male hegemony of the novel by focusing on how the clash between the political and the personal is played out in the intersections of class, gender and Welsh ethnicity. Williams investigates this nexus through the role of the women, who experience the correlation of patriarchal and class power in their everyday lives. This article is therefore an attempt to explore in critical detail the ways in which Williams succeeded in dramatizing the convergence of and conflict between individual and collective through the alternative Herstories that are woven into his novels.

This article explores the way in which Agnes Owens, a 20th century working-class writer from Scotland, gives a literary voice to those most marginalized and underprivileged, a category of workers that is often defined as the precariat. The first part of the article traces the historic origins of the term precariat within marxism, then linking it to the growing number of people working today in low paid, short-term and uninsured jobs often beyond the pale of the rest of society. Their accompanying condition of neo-poverty is what Agnes Owens sought to dramatize in her novels and short stories, two of which – "Arabella" and Bad Attitudes – are chosen for more detailed discussion. The article seeks to show how Owens not only documents the lives of this modern precariat, but also how these new forms of social deprivation are feminized, since it is clearly the women who are most vulnerable in this new context of social and economic precarity.

In this article, I want to trace the interwoven pattern of relationships between Tillie Olsen's life as a working-class mother, her radical political commitment as a socialist and feminist and her own fictional and non-fictional writing. I want to show that despite the fragmentary nature of her literary production, there is a tangible and essential link between her personal experience, her politics and her aesthetics as a modern proletarian writer. It is, I would claim, this combination of gender, class and radical consciousness that enabled her to produce some of the most remarkably unorthodox fictional narratives of working-class women's lives in the whole of twentieth-century American literature.