En bok till!

 Tillsammans med mina kollegor Michael Sanders och Wiktor Marzec håller jag på att att sätta samman en antologi om arbetarlitteratur från olika länder, som förhoppningsvis kommer att ges ut av förlaget Palgrave nästa år. Preliminär titel är Working-Class Literatures: National and International Traditions.

När vi raggade bidrag beskrev vi projektet såhär:

This collection emerges out of the ‘Industrial Labour and Literary Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century’ conference organised jointly by the AHRC-funded ‘Piston, Pen & Press’ project and the Finnish Labour Museum which was held in Tampere in 2019. This conference brought together scholars from seven different countries. At the conference it became increasingly clear that the relationship between a ‘native’ working-class literature and its ‘national’ literary tradition was subject to enormous variations - from being central to the formation of the national canon in Sweden and Finland, fluctuating in accordance with the vagaries of political history in Poland, through to its almost total exclusion in England (though not in Scotland). Additionally, the conference identified the importance of international connections to the development of ‘native’ working class literatures, occurring both through the circulation of translated literature and ongoing contact with workers who had emigrated in search of work. The conference concluded that any study of working class literature had to be attentive to both its national and international contexts. This volume is intended as a contribution to this emerging field of study.

We are planning an edited collection organised around the following key questions: What is the relationship between 'working class' literature and the 'canon' within specific national traditions? How does working class literature establish itself within the nation - newspapers, libraries, publishing houses etc? What role is played by international exchanges in the construction of working class literature?

Bland de medverkande finns bland andra Sabine Hake, Luka Lei Zhang och Elsi Hyttinen och boken kommer bland annat att behandla arbetarlitteratur från Kina, Finland, England, Sverige, Tyskland och Polen. Själv tänker jag skriva om arbetarlitteraturen i den svenska fackförbundspressen, utifrån en studie av Kommunalarbetaren 1970.

Som ett led i arbetet har vi ordnat en liten konferens där många av bidragsgivarna kommer att presentera sin forskning. Konferensen hålls helt digitalt idag, i morgon och på onsdag.