Seminar: Working-class Life Writing: from Micro-story to Macro-perspecitives through a Critical and Pedagogic Online Edition

Professor Timothy Ashplant, independent scholar”Working-class Life Writing: from Micro-story to Macro-perspectives  through a Critical and Pedagogic Online Edition”

Despite the “theory revolution” of the 1970s onwards in literary  studies, and the earlier shift to “history from below”, working-class  writing – including life-writing – remains relatively neglected and  few works have been accorded close textual and contextual attention. This paper will sketch out a project I am just beginning: to create an  online edition of one working-class life narrative by George Hewins  (1879-1977): The Dillen: Memories of a Man of Stratford-upon-Avon  (1981). This text was produced by Hewins’s granddaughter-in-law,  Angela Hewins, from interviews she conducted with him in his mid-90s. Textual and contextual links through the web could make the book a microhistorical window onto late Victorian and Edwardian England.

Textually, Hewins’s narrative is woven from various discourses,  including folk song and music-hall.  Links could be made from his use  of music-hall songs into primary (recordings, sheet music) and  secondary (histories of music hall) sources.  Contextual links would  locate his personal experiences of the Volunteers, the workhouse, the  Shakespeare Memorial Theatre within wider civic, county and national  structures of power and ideology. I envisage the seminar as a space  for preliminary exploration, to test what might be called “proof of  concept”, and hope for lively discussion about possibilities and  problems.

T. G. Ashplant was formerly Professor of Social and Cultural History.  He is author of Fractured Loyalties: Masculinity, Class & Politics in  Britain, 1900-30 (2007); co-editor of Explorations in Cultural History  (with G. Smyth 2001), and The Politics of War Memory & Commemoration  (with G. Dawson & M. Roper 2000); and an editor of the International  Auto/Biography Association (Europe)’s new e-journal, the European  Journal of Life-Writing, published by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam  from 2012.