The Intersection of Class and Space in British Postwar Writing

Simon Lee is Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University, USA where he researches and teaches Post-WWII British literature, social class and labour history. He has published on writers such as Colin MacInnes, Shelagh Delaney, John Osborne and Pat Barker, and on topics such as immigration, nationalism and cultural identity.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 “Look at the State of this Place!”—The Impact of Domestic Space on Post-WWII Class Consciousness
Post-WWII Housing and Classed Space
Theorizing Domestic Space and Class Identity
Domestic Anxiety in Look Back in Anger
Renegotiations of Identity in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Queering the Domestic in A Taste of Honey

2 “Off Down the Local”—Institutional Borders in Working-Class Communities
Shared Space and Working-Class Institutions
Collective Consciousness and Shared Experience
Shared Space and Identity Formation in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Class Migration and Social Stasis in This Sporting Life
Contours of Class and Mobility in Up the Junction

3 Spatial Transgression and The Working-Class Imaginary
Theorizing Spatial Transgression: From the Production of Space to the Non-Space
Transgressive Space and Post-WWII Potentiality
Spatial Transgression and the Working-Class Imaginary in Up the Junction
Subterranean Space and Diasporic Demimondes in City of Spades
Differential Space and Inversion in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

4 Against Class Fetishism: The Legacy of Kitchen Sink Realism
A Genealogy of the Realist Mode: Form Versus Function
Critical Approaches to Kitchen Sink Aesthetics
Multimedia Motifs and Kitchen Sink Thematics
Commodified “Kitsch-en” Sinks in Coronation Street
Channel 4 and Coordinated Class Effects
Theaters of Anger and Aggression
Class and Space in Contemporary Fiction

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index