E. P. Thompson and the Cultural Politics of Literary Modernism
Accepted version
Peer-reviewed
Repository URI
Repository DOI
Change log
Authors
Middleton, Stuart
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.
Description
Keywords
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Journal Title
Contemporary British History
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
1361-9462
1743-7997
1743-7997
Volume Title
28
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Publisher DOI
Sponsorship
AHRC (1076613)