Kitchen Sink Aesthetics
The Intersection of Class and Space in British Postwar Writing
Bloomsbury, 2023
Centering on the British kitchen sink realism movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically its documentation of the built environment's influence on class consciousness, this book highlights the settings of a variety of novels, plays, and films, turning to archival research to offer new ways of thinking about how spatial representation in cultural production sustains or intervenes in the process of social stratification.
MoreLocating Classed Subjectivities
Space and Social Class in 19th, 20th, and 21st-Century British Writing
Ed. Simon Lee
Routledge, 2022
Locating Classed Subjectivities explores representations of social class in British fiction through the lens of spatial theory and analysis. By analyzing a range of class-conscious texts from the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first centuries, the collection provides an overview of the way British writers mobilized spatial aesthetics as a means to comment on the intricacies of social class.
More“Mediating Desire: Karel Reisz’s Adaptation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”
in Adult Themes: British Cinema and the “X” Certificate in the Long 1960s
Eds. Anne Etienne, Benjamin Halligan, and Christopher Weedman
Bloomsbury, 2023
"Mediating Desire” looks at Karel Reisz’s 1960 adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 novel, focusing specifically on how the director mediated conflicts between the desires of postwar British censor and the author’s trascible nature. In essence, this chapter tells the story of a director developing his craft, moving from the niche Free Cinema movement to that of mainstream cinema.
More“Addressing Stigma: Demonized Locales in Pat Barker’s Union Street”
in Locating Classed Subjectitivities
Ed. Simon Lee
Routledge, 2022
“Addressing Stigma” reads Pat Barker’s challenging 1982 novel Union Street as representative of spatialized class consciousness. Drawing on Loïc Wacquant's “territorial stigmatization,” the essay considers the way social stratification and urban red-lining function to construct, sustain, and quarantine abject bodies.
More“Social Class and Mental Health in Contemporary British Fiction”
in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class
Ed. Gloria MacMillan
Routledge, 2021
This essay confronts community-driven insularity, looking in particular at the way identities form around shared immisseration. The essay turns to Richard Milward’s 2007 novel Apples to consider the way notions of sustenance and grit limit access to resources.
More“Lit-Grit: The Gritty and the Grim in Working-Class Cultural Production”
in The Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies
Eds. Michele Fazio, Christie Launius, and Tim Stragleman
Routledge, 2020
This essay exlores the polysemous notion of “grit” as a term appropriated by neoliberal bootstrap narratives. It considers how the term connotes survival in spaces marked by indsutrial grit and grime. As such, the essay considers how such terms are commodified as part and parcel of a identity still perceived as monolithic.
More“‘Look at the State of This Place!’: The Impact of Domestic Space on Post-war Class” Consciousness
in Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice
Eds. Ben Clarke and Nick Hubble
Palgrave, 2018
“Look at the State of this Place” analyzes the intersection of domestic sanctuary and sites of industrial labour. Turning, quite literally, to the kitchen sink of kitchen sink realism, the chapter shows how postwar class-conscious writing figured new modes of articulated identity in response to the limits of urban space.
More“British Working-Class Writing: Paradox and Tension as Genre Motif”
in Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives
Eds. John Lennon and Magnus Nilsson
Stockholm University Press, 2017
This essay questions the efficacy and viability of a “working-class” genre, arguing instead that class dynamics are too slippery to lock down. Instead, the essay surveys a range of British texts to show how, if tangible conventions exists, they exist through their own resistance to codification.
More“Brutal Youth: Colin MacInnes and the Architecture of the Welfare State”
The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Vol. 3 No. 1 (2018)
This essay considers postwat British architecture, especially the kins of housing developed in the immediate post-WWII years to help solve the housing crisis. Reading Colin MacInnes’ trilolgy of novels about a shifting London, the essay demonsrates a sense of movement into, beneath, and then out of the city into alienated high-rise structures as gentrification takes hold.
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