Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
1 Introduction: 'They at Least Were Not Hybrids'.
A Multiplicity in Unity: The Birmingham Writers and Their City.
Shaping Influences: Finding the Exotic in the Everyday.
'Going Over': The Cultural Diaspora.
'At last the British are Coming': Prevailing and Contemporary Critiques of Working-Class Literature.
The Ethnographic Turn.
2 This Working Life: Work and the Workplace.
A Fellow Traveller? Henry Green: Birmingham's Adoptive Proletarian.
Walter Allen: 'As a Film Director might present it': Blind Man's Ditch.
'As Unpolitical a Man as I Have Ever Met': Leslie Halward.
Leslie Halward: 'Belcher's Hod'.
3 Feeling the Pinch: Unemployment.
A Qualitative Deficit: Filling the Statistical Gap.
Walter Brierley: Frustration and Bitterness: A Colliery Banksman.
Walter Brierley: Means Test Man.
John Hampson: 'Man About the House'.
Walter Allen:
Innocence Is Drowned.
4 Writing Their Selves: Subjectivity and Representation in Birmingham Group Narrative.
A Reluctant Collier? Walter Brierley: 'Body'.
Walter Brierley: Sandwichman.
Leslie Halward: 'A Broken Engagement'.
Peter Chamberlain: An Eavesdropper's Secrets: 'Mr. Marris' Reputation' and 'What the Hell?'.
John Hampson: Saturday Night at the Greyhound.
5 Conclusion.
Coda: Dispersal.
The Legacy.