Synopses & Reviews
Review
"As Shiach hopes, these readings...help us to understand more of our own conflicted and yet intense relations to the activity and the significance of human labour." Kate Flint, Studies in English Literature"...Shiach's study makes a key contribution to this field by defining the contours of a richly complex and ambivalent modernist relationship to labor." English Literature in Transition, Lisa Hager, University of Florida
Synopsis
Shiach examines the ways in which labour was experienced and represented between 1890 and 1930. There is a critical tradition in literary and historical studies that sees the impact of modernity on human labour in terms of intensification and alienation. Shiach, however, explores a series of efforts to articulate the relations between labour and selfhood within modernism. Through readings of Sylvia Pankhurst and D. H. Lawrence, Shiach shows how labour underpins the political and textual innovations of the period. This study will be of interest to literary and cultural scholars alike.
Table of Contents
Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Philosophies of labour and selfhood; 2. Technologies of labour: washing and typing; 3. Sylvia Pankhurst: labour and representation; 4. D. H. Lawrence: labour, organicism, and the individual; 5. The general strike: labour and the future tense.