E. P. Thompson and the Cultural Politics of Literary Modernism

Abstract

This article re-examines E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963) as an attempt to resolve problems of Communist cultural thought that were derived from literary modernism, centring upon the relationship between intellectual and majority cultures. It argues that Thompson formulated a distinctive concept of ‘agency’ as the corporate attribute of an alliance between intellectuals and the working class, in order to envisage the repair of a quasi-modernist ‘dissociation’ that was constitutive of those groups; and that tracing the narration of this process in The Making illuminates the text’s significance as a contribution to socialist political strategy in the 1960s.