Literalisation of Class Antagonism: The Dichotomy of them and us in Alan Sillitoe’s Fiction
Keywords:
Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Key to the Door, ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, The Dichotomy of them and usAbstract
The aim of this study is to propose a Marxist reading of Sillitoe’s fiction, particularly Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), Key to the Door (1961) and “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” (1959), and to elucidate the metaphors of mental and physical rebellion against the Establishment through the dichotomy of them and us. Over the course of the study, the domestic, cultural, social and political tendencies of the characters will be reinterpreted with an attempt to critically lay out Sillitoe’s authentic portrayal of the socio-historical reality of class consciousness and his fiction’s emergence as part of the particular and complex historical circumstances pertaining in the UK during the 1950s. His literary works will be approached in conjunction with other key texts that engage with history and class consciousness, including Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working- Class Life (first published in1957). In this way, the atomizing and victimizing influences of industrial capitalism in historical actuality will also be investigated through the examination of the ways in which Sillitoe mediates the subjective experiences of the working-class characters in his fiction.
Downloads
References
Atherton, Stanley S.. Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment. London: W. H. Allen, 1979. Print.
Bentley, Nick. Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s. Germany: Peter Lang, 2007. Print.
Billington, Michael. ‘Alan Sillitoe, Angry Young Writer of the 1950s, Dies at 82’. The Guardian 25 April 2010. Web. 2 Jan. 2016.
Bradbury, Malcolm. ‘Beating the World to the Punch’. New York Times Book Review 16 August 1959. Web. 21 May 2016.
Denny, N. ‘The Achievement of the Long-distance Runner’. Theoria 24 (1965): 1-12. Print.
Engels, Friedrich (1876/78). Anti Dühring. Retrieved from
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Engels_Anti_Duhring.pdf. Web. 11 October 2016.
Giddin, James. ‘Alan Sillitoe’s Jungle’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 4.1 (1962): 35-48. Print.
Green, Peter. ‘Book Review’. Daily Telegraph and Morning Post 17 October 1958. Web. 18 April 2016.
Hitchcock, Peter. Working Class Fiction in Theory and Practice: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe. London: UMI Research, 1989. Print.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. London: Penguin Classics, 2009. Print.
Kalliney, Peter. J.. ‘Cities of Affluence: Masculinity, Class, and the Young Angry Young Men’. Modern Fiction Studies 47. 1 (2001): 92-117. Print.
Lenin, Vladimir. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Sydney: Resistance Books, 1999. Print.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf. Web. 17 September 2017.
Mayne, Richard. ‘Book Review’. Sunday Times 12 October 1958. Web. 22 April 2017.
Richardson, Maurice. ‘New Novels’. New Statesman 18 October 1958. Web. 16 Apr. 2017.
Salman, Malek M.. ‘Post-war British Working-class Fiction with Special References to the Novels of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe,
Stan Barston, David Storey and Barry Hines’. The University of Leeds, 1990. Ph.D. Thesis.
Sillitoe, Alan. Key to the Door. London: W. H. Allen, 1961. Print.
--- ‘Poor People’. Anarchy, 4. 4 (April, 1964). 124-128. Print.
--- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: Harper Perennial, 1958. Print.
--- The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. London: W.H. Allen, 1959. Print.
Vaverka, Ronal Dee. Commitment as Art: A Marxist Critique of a Selection of Alan Sillitoe’s Political Fiction. Uppsala: Ubsaliensis s. Academiae, 1978. Print.
Wain, John. ‘Possible Worlds’. Observer 12 October 1958. Web. 29 January 2016.
Waugh, Patricia. ‘The Historical Context of Post-War British Literature’. The Post-war British Literature Handbook. Eds. Katharine Cockin and Jago Morrison. London: Continuum, 2010. Print.
West, Anthony. ‘On the Inside Looking In’. New Yorker 5 September 1959. Web. 12 September 2016.
Wood, Allen W.. Karl Marx. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Downloads
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Authors may deposit the Submitted version; Accepted version (Author Accepted Manuscript); or Published version (Version of Record) in an institutional repository of the author's choice.
