Proletarian literature refers here to the literature created by left-wing writers mainly for the class-conscious proletariat. Though the Encyclopædia Britannica states that because it "is essentially an intended device of revolution", it is therefore often published, though not necessarily written, by Communist Party or left-wing sympathizers, the proletarian novel has also been categorized without any emphasis on revolution, as a novel "about the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the intention of making propaganda".J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Criticism. (London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 703. This different emphasis may reflect a difference between Russian, American and other traditions of working-class writing, with that of Britain. The British tradition was not especially inspired by the Communist Party, but had its roots in the Chartist movement, and socialism, amongst others.Ian Hayward, Working-Class Fiction: from Chartism to 'Trainspotting. (London: Northcote House, 1997), pp. 1-3 Furthermore, writing about the British working-class writers, H Gustav Klaus, in The Socialist Novel: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (1982) suggested that "the once current [term] 'proletarian' is, internationally, on the retreat, while the competing concepts of 'working-class' and 'socialist' continue to command about equal adherence".Brighton: Harvest Press, 1982, p. 1.
The word proletarian is also used, more narrowly, to describe works about the working class by working-class authors, to distinguish them from works by middle-class authors such as Charles Dickens (Hard Times), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), and Henry Green (Living).John Fordham, "'A Strange Field’: Region and Class in the Novels of Harold Heslop" in Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Kristin Bluemel. Published 2009 :Edinburgh University Press, note no.1, p. 71. William Blake (1757–1827) was also of the middle-class, but some of his works are early examples of working-class literature, including the two "The Chimney Sweeper" poems, published in Songs of Innocence in 1789 and Songs of Experience in 1794, which deal with the subject of child labour."William Blake Page ", The Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, & the Arts
Proletarian novel The proletariat are members of the working class. The proletarian novel is a subgenre of the novel, written by workers mainly for other workers. It overlaps and sometimes is synonymous with the working-class novel,H. Gustav Klaus, The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition. ( Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982, p. 1. socialist novel,H. Gustav Klaus. social problem novel (also problem novel or sociological novel or social novel),A Handbook to Literature 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), p.487; "social problem novel." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 02 Nov. 2012. propaganda or thesis novel,J. A. Cuddon (revised C. E. Preston), The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 704, 913 and socialist realism novel.
The proletarian novel may comment on political events, systems and theories, and is frequently seen as an instrument to promote social reform or political revolution among the working classes. Proletarian literature is created especially by communist, socialist, and anarchist authors. It is about the lives of poor, and the period 1930 to 1945 in particular produced many such novels. However, there were works before and after these dates. In Britain the term working class literature, novel etc. is more generally used. The intention of the writers of proletarian literature is to lift the workers from the slums, by inspiring them to embrace the possibilities of social change or a political revolution. By country Australia
Australian authors who have contributed to proletarian literature have typically been affiliated with the Communist Party of Australia or the Australian Labor Party. Some prominent proletarian fiction authors include Frank Hardy (Power Without Glory) and David Ireland (The Unknown Industrial Prisoner about factory workers in Western Sydney).
France Two leading French writers who were born into the working class were Jean Giono (1895–1970) and Henry Poulaille (1896–1980).
Jean Giono was the son of a cobbler and a laundry woman, who spent most of his life in Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. He was a voracious reader but had to leave school at sixteen to work in a bank to help support his family. He published his first novel Colline in 1929, which won him the Prix Brentano and $1000, and an English translation of the book, he left the bank in 1930 to devote himself to writing on a full-time basis.
The novels Giono published during the nineteen-thirties are set in Provence, with peasants as protagonists, and displaying a pantheistic view of nature. Marcel Pagnol based three of his films on Giono's work of this period: Regain, with Fernandel and music by Honegger, Angèle, and La Femme du boulanger, with Raimu.
After World War II he planned on writing a sequence of ten novels inspired by Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, in which he would depict characters from all strata of society rather than peasants, and contrast different moments in history by depicting the experiences of members of the same family a hundred years apart. But Giono only completed the four Hussard novels, Mort d’un personnage (1948)), Le Hussard sur le Toit (1951), Le Bonheur fou (1957), Angelo (1958).
Henry Poulaille was the son of a carpenter and cane worker, who was orphaned at fourteen. In addition to writing novels Poulaille was active in encouraging working class writing in France from the 1930s.See for example: Burin André and Jean Rousselot, Dictionary of Contemporary French Literature. Paris: Larousse, 1966. See especially Michel Ragon, History of Proletarian Literature in France. Paris: Albin Michel, 1974. He is the author of numerous novels, essays on the cinema, literature, and popular traditions. Amongst the novels that he wrote are autobiographical works: There were four (1925); Daily Bread (1931); The Wretched of the Earth (1935); Soldier of Pain (1937); The Survivors: Soldier of Pain 2 (1938); Alone in life to 14 years (published posthumously in 1980). In these novels, based on his own life, Poulaiile depicts a working-class family, the Magneux.Michel Ragon, History of proletarian literature in France.
Great Britain 19th century
Poet John Clare (1793–1864) was an important early British working-class writer. Clare was the son of a farm labourer, and came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption.Geoffrey Summerfield, in introduction to John Clare: Selected Poems, Penguin Books 1990, pp 13–22. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets.Sales, Roger (2002) John Clare: A Literary Life; Palgrave Macmillan . His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self".Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A biography; Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2003
A mid-Victorian example of a working-class novel is chartist Thomas Martin Wheeler's Sunshine and Shadows, which was serialized in the Northern Star 1849–50.Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction: from Chartism to 'Trainspotting' . (Plymouth: Nortcote House, 1997), p7 Another chartist writer was the shoemaker poet Thomas Cooper,Owen Ashton and Stephen Roberts, The Victorian Working-class Writer, Cassell, 1999, p. 5. Retrieved 2 April 2021. who, while in prison for making an inflammatory speech, "followed in the footsteps of Bunyan and other radicals and wrote imaginatively about the themes of oppression and emancipation".Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction, pp. 5-6.
20th century Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole (1933) has been described as an "excellent example" of an English proletarian novel.J. A Cuddon, p. 703. It was written during the early 1930s as a response to the crisis of unemployment, which was being felt locally, nationally, and internationally. It is set in Hanky Park, the industrial slum in Salford where Greenwood was born and brought up. The story begins around the time of the General Strike of 1926, but its main action takes place in 1931.
Several working-class writers wrote about their experience of life in the merchant navy, including James Hanley, Jim Phelan, George Garrett, and John Sommerfield. Liverpool-Irish writer James Hanley wrote a number of works based on his experiences at sea as well as a member of a working-class seafaring family. An early example is the novella The Last Voyage (1931), in which stoker John Reilly, who is still working only because he lied about his age, now faces his last voyage.Stokes, p. 90. Although Reilly is in his mid-sixties he has a young family, who will have to live in future on his inadequate pension.Stokes, p. 16. In another sense this is Reilly's last voyage, because despairing of the future he throws himself into the ship's furnace: “Saw all his life illuminated in those flames. ‘Not much for us. Sweat, sweat. Pay off. Sign on. Sweat, sweat. Pay off. Finish. Ah, well!’”Paul Binding, "Man Against Fate", a review of James Hanley's Last Voyage and Other Stories. Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 1997, p.21.Last Voyage and Other Stories (London: Harvill Press, 1997, p. 43. Among other works by Hanley are Boy (1931) and The Furys (1935).