British Working-Class Literature, Higher Education and Identity Politics: Elevating Working-Class Voices in New Literary Pedagogies

Abstract

This article interrogates the absence of working-class literature modules at the UK undergraduate level before evaluating various attempts at incorporating working-class voices and working-class literature within new and emerging literary pedagogies. It begins by outlining the current state of (predominantly British) working-class literary studies, and questions why working-class voices and working-class texts haven’t been granted similar or equal footing for undergraduate academic study within the UK higher education sector. It then goes on to consider how the rise of identity politics has impacted attempts at defining, representing and accounting for working-class experiences. While acknowledging that other disciplines which have emerged from recent shifts toward identity politics (including gender studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory) all seek, in varying degrees, to decentre the white patriarchal experience and disrupt and decolonise the status quo, this article determines that the inclusion of working-class perspectives at the same level remains confused, vague, and sometimes taboo – putting genuine working-class voices at risk of assimilation, marginalisation, and/or ostracization. The article goes on to qualitatively evaluate a number of recent pedagogical attempts at rectifying this issue, resisting demands to position class-consciousness in diametric opposition to popular models of identity politics, and making the case instead for valuable, insightful, and intersectional literary pedagogies which identify and showcase working-classness as a formative aspect of identity-making on par with other important aspects of self-identity. Consequently, it promotes the need for continued research into how British working-class literature might be defined, taught, and disseminated to a new generation of students in UK higher education, primarily to prevent working-class voices becoming (or remaining) a peripheral concern in new literary pedagogies.