Literature and Class

'Andrew Hadfield's timely and important study addresses a crucial category that is less debated and arguably far less understood than race or gender. This is a formidable study - bold, ambitious, and original - and one that promises to augment significantly our knowledge of a key category of human existence.'>'Archivally rich and theoretically sophisticated, this is the exploration of English literature and social class we desperately need. Conceiving of class in terms derived from Akala as well as Marx, Mary Collier as well as E. P. Thompson and Gareth Stedman Jones, Hadfield shows irrefutably how intimations of class differences and class struggle evolved long before the Industrial Revolution.'>This book explores the intimate relationship between literature and class in England (and later Britain), and demonstrates how literary texts are determined by class relations and how they represent the interaction of classes in profound and apparently trivial ways. It argues throughout that class cannot be seen as a modern phenomenon that occurred after the Industrial revolution, but that class divisions and relations have always structured societies, and it makes sense to assume a historical continuity. The book explores a number of themes relating to class: class consciousness; class conflict; commercialisation; servitude; the relationship between agrarian and urban society; rebellion; gender relations; and colonisation. After outlining the history of class relations in England and, after the union of 1707, Scotland, five chapters explore the ways in which social class consciously and unconsciously influenced a series of writers including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Taylor, Robert Herrick, Aphra Behn, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, Daniel Defoe, Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, Frances Burney, Robert Burns, William Blake and William Wordsworth. Literature and class concludes with Percy Bysshe Shelley's An Address to the Irish People (1812), pointing to the need to explore class relations in the context of the British Isles and Ireland, as well as the British Empire, which a future work will analyse.