Proletarian literature

[3] Furthermore, writing about the British working-class writers, H Gustav Klaus, in The Socialist Novel: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (1982) suggested that "the once current [term] 'proletarian' is, internationally, on the retreat, while the competing concepts of 'working-class' and 'socialist' continue to command about equal adherence".

Some prominent proletarian fiction authors include Frank Hardy (Power Without Glory) and David Ireland (The Unknown Industrial Prisoner about factory workers in Western Sydney).

He published his first novel Colline in 1929, which won him the Prix Brentano and $1000, and an English translation of the book,[12] he left the bank in 1930 to devote himself to writing on a full-time basis.

[14] Marcel Pagnol based three of his films on Giono's work of this period: Regain, with Fernandel and music by Honegger, Angèle, and La Femme du boulanger, with Raimu.

[20] Another chartist writer was the shoemaker poet Thomas Cooper,[21] who, while in prison for making an inflammatory speech, "followed in the footsteps of Bunyan and other radicals and wrote imaginatively about the themes of oppression and emancipation".

Several working-class writers wrote about their experience of life in the merchant navy, including James Hanley, Jim Phelan, George Garrett, and John Sommerfield.

Liverpool-Irish writer James Hanley wrote a number of works based on his experiences at sea as well as a member of a working-class seafaring family.

There were a number of Welsh writers who wrote works based on their experiences as coal miners, including novelist (and playwright) Jack Jones (1884–1970), B.L.

Harold Heslop, author of the novel The Earth Beneath (1946) was another coal miner, but from the north-east of England, as was Sid Chaplin, who wrote The Thin Seam (1949).

This often depicted the domestic situations of working class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.

[28][29] The following are some other important twentieth-century British working class novelists and novels: Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914); James C. Welsh, The Underworld (1920); Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, This Slavery (1925); Ellen Wilkinson, Clash (1929); Lionel Britton, Hunger and Love (1931); Lewis Grassic Gibbon A Scots Quair (trilogy, 1932-4); Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave (1968); William McIlvanney, Docherty (1975); Pat Barker, Union Street (1982); James Kelman, The Busconductor Hines (1984); Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993).

[36] Author Korehito Kurehara traveled secretly to the Soviet Union in 1930 for the Profintern conference, and upon his return in 1931, he started agitating for the democratization of literary organizations.

One such example would be the short story "Starvation and Slaughter" ("Kia wa Saryuk", 1925) by author Ch'oe Sŏ-hae, which detailed problems like discrimination between the wealthy and the poor classes.

Yŏmgunsa, meaning Torch of the Masses, was a group and movement formed in 1922 that was led by the writer Song Yŏng, and built on a focus towards literature pertaining to social issues and class politics.

[40][41] Leader of Yŏmgunsa, and a key author in KAPF's circle, Song Yŏng primarily wrote with the intention of forming a solidarity within Korea as well as with Japan through his writing.

[42] Two works, "Our Love" in 1929, and "Shift Change" in 1930 highlight Yŏng's ideology of unification within his writing, as well as the idea of moving away from cultural nostalgia and an idyllic past.

[42] In "Our Love", the process of industrialization and its resulting urban cities are portrayed as locales of potential opportunity rather than iniquitous environments, depicting a contrasting opinion to other works produced within KAPF.

This is first shown through Yong-hee, a primary character within the story who eventually leaves the Korean countryside and travels to Tokyo, in pursuit of escaping her hometown's oppressive patriarchal culture and finding unity, independence, and equality in urban Japan's workforce.

[45] Istrati's first attempts at writing date from around 1907 when he started sending pieces to the socialist periodicals in Romania, debuting with the article, Hotel Regina in România Muncitoare.

Istrati's travels were marked by two successive unhappy marriages, a brief return to Romania in 1915 when he tried to earn his living as a pig farmer, and long periods of vagabondage.

Soviet scholar Robert Bird considered his work as the "first systematic treatment of art by a Communist leader" and a catalyst for later, Marxist cultural and critical theories.

According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, Trotsky recognised “like Lenin on the need for a socialist culture to absorb the finest products of bourgeois art”.

The novel's protagonist, Pavel Korchagin, represented the "young hero" of Russian literature: he is dedicated to his political causes, which help him to overcome his tragedies.

"[58] Proletarian literature in Scandinavia is represented by writers such as the Dane Martin Andersen Nexø, Norwegian Johan Falkberget and Väinö Linna from Finland.

Proletarian literature became widely known in the 1930s when a group of non-academic, self-taught writers like Ivar Lo-Johansson, Eyvind Johnson, Jan Fridegård and Harry Martinson appeared writing about the working-class, often from the perspective of a young man.

Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson both later went on to write about other subjects and are mostly associated with proletarian literature by their highly acclaimed and widely read autobiographical novels published in the 1930s.

[59] Halldór Laxness's novel Independent People (1934-35), deals with the struggle of poor Icelandic farmers in the early 20th century, only freed from debt bondage in the last generation, and surviving on isolated crofts in an inhospitable landscape.

[citation needed] In the United States, Mike Gold, author of Jews Without Money, was the first to promote proletarian literature in Max Eastman's magazine The Liberator and later in The New Masses.

The Communist party newspaper, The Daily Worker also published some literature, as did numerous other magazines, including The Anvil, edited by Jack Conroy, Blast, and Partisan Review.

[citation needed] Other examples of American proletarian writing include B. Traven, The Death Ship (1926) (though it is presumed that Traven was born in Germany); Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth (1929); Edward Dahlberg, Bottom Dogs (1929); Jack Conroy, The Disinherited (1933); James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan (a trilogy, 1932-5); Robert Cantwell, The Land of Plenty (1934); Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934); Meridel Le Sueur, Salute to Spring (1940) and Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio (1930s, published 1974).