Quote:
Originally Posted by lionel
I don't at all, I was talking about a (somewhat false) assumption, which has always existed with critics and readers, that working-class fiction should be realist: certainly in the British 1930s books I was mainly talking about, with, for instance, their endless descriptions of work in mines and mining acccidents, where some books tend to merge into one.
The annus mirabilis of modernism came in 1922 (Ulysses, The Waste Land, etc), and by the beginning of the 1930s in England it had given way to the Auden generation, with more of an emphasis of realism and political reality. In the thirties, that reality was strongly left-wing, and modernism was considered by influential marxists such as Lukács to be bourgeois. To stand a chance in the market place, and perhaps of being translated into Russian, a 'proletarian' novel had to be realist: otherwise, it would be ignored or critically condemned. And to add to that, many English critics (such as Connolly and Swinnerton) thought modernism elitist, which was a slightly different criticism. The working-class modernist writer really didn't stand a chance, although a few books (or, to be more exact, small parts of them) slipped through the net and were accepted as towing the socialist line.
... Certainly working-class modernist literary production in America wasn't subjected to the same scorn as it was in Britain.
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The things you write about British mechanisms are very fascinating indeed. A sign of how little of British 1930s goings-on (?) I am aware of is that I know none of the critics or writers you cited in this or the last post. Hugely irritating. Whence your interest in that period?
In GDR literature much of the scorn for non-realist literature is due to the fact that they wanted to not have merely an intellectual elite lording it over the workers, who, after all, have had no opportunity to educated themselves in a serious manner. And I do see the point. Witness this thread
Is fiction important? with several people agreeing that literature is important and can affect minds and the society. But then they say: well you DO have to understand it first, do you. This shuts out the bulk of society and not just today, but even more so then. And if you note my own post on the topic there, the books I stressed were simple novels, easy to grasp and shattering in their effect. This is all so much blah but I wanted, from my pov, to try to explain the bias you described. Your post does suggest you already know this so if you do, I'm sorry.
