Narratives of Labour and Labour Lost: Working Life and Its Representations

Abstract

Critics have suggested that as the twentieth century unfolded the novel form begin to encode a ‘powerful valorization of work, a commitment to the importance of labour’ (Klaus and Knight, 2000: 3), and this structure of feeling is present even in negative depictions of work, as in the context of unemployment, a condition found in writing from the 1930s and, more recently, the 1980s. But representations of work and workers have never been restricted to literature; indeed literary fiction in Britain during the course of the twentieth century rarely engaged with the everyday lives of the working class, hence George Orwell’s view that ‘if you look for the working class in fiction, espedaily in English fiction, all you find is a hole’. Despite Orwell’s view, it is the case that ‘parables’ of labour, of work, have found articulation in cultural production, and this articulation has often been most pronounced at moments of perceived change. Examining narratives from the twentieth century to the present considers the ‘valorization’ of work; however, we focus not only on the novel, concentrating instead on other discursive practices that provide ‘parables’ of labour.