The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change

by David Craig

The individual studies in this book go to make up an argument that literature is best understood when seen as situated in its age. The earlier chapters discuss different ways in which love was expressed, and repressed, in different times. The middle chapters explore conflicting visions of life which writers, songsters, and working people entertained in the face of industrialism and the changes it caused in our society. Later chapters discuss the work in which poets from various countries responded imaginatively to the upheavals of the twentieth century. The final chapters seek to evaluate and explain the New Wave in fiction, drama and poetry, which has flourished since the later 1950s. The aim throughout has been to draw freely on social history where this is necessary for the fullest possible understanding of the literature, to explain literature not simply from itself, but as part of the culture that rests upon those 'unseen foundations of society which, until they shift, or crumble, most men in most generations are wont to take for granted', and to pay more attention than usual to forms such as folksong.

Contents: Introduction; Section One LOVE AND SOCIETY: Chapter: 1. Shakespeare, Lawrence and Sexual Freedom; 2. Adam Blair and the Literature of Repression. Section Two: INDUSTRIAL CULTURE: 3. Songs of the Bleak Age; 4. Militant Culture; 5. 'Hard Times' and the Condition of England; 6. Fiction and the 'Rising Industrial Classes'; 7. Lawrence and Democracy; Section Three: POETRY AND MODERN LIFE: 8. Loneliness and Anarchy: Aspects of Modernism; 9. The Defeatism of The Waste Land; 10. The New Poetry of Socialism; 11. MacDiarmid the Marxist Poet; Section 4: THE NEW WAVE: 12. Hear Them Talking To You; 13: Sillitoe and the Roots of Anger; 14. Growing Points of Literature; Index

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

David Craig (b. 1932) was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and the University of Aberdeen. From 1959 to 1961 he lectured in English at the University of Ceylon. He was subsequently Organising Tutor for the Workers' Educational Association, West Yorkshire.