The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth-Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory, by Ben Jones * Working-Class Suburb: Social Change on an English Council Estate, 1930-2010. by Mark Clapson

2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (537) ◽  
pp. 500-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Community Identity

scholarly journals Violence and Social Memory in Twentieth-Century Belfast: Stories of Buck Alec Robinson

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 734-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean O'Connell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Made In

AbstractThis article explores the life and commemoration of Buck Alec Robinson. A feared loyalist killer in 1920s Belfast, in more recent times he has featured as a lion-keeping “character” on wall murals and in tourist guide books. Robinson is employed as a case study to investigate two separate but, in this case, interlinked historiographical debates. The first involves Norbert Elias's analysis of the decline of violence. The second relates to discussion of the analysis of social memory in working-class communities, with violence being placed therein. The article supports historical assessments suggesting that the “civilizing offensive” had an uneven impact. That point is usually made in the context of working-class men. This article extends it to political elites in Belfast and probes their flirtations with violent hard men. The case is made that it is a mistake to assume the “civilizing” dynamic is to be understood as a teleological or top-down process.

Reverse, restore, repeat!

Focaal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (72) ◽  
pp. 95-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eeva Kesküla
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Term Analysis

In this article, I look at Russian-speaking miners' perception of their position in Estonian society, along with their moral economy. Former heroes, glorified for their class and ethnicity, they feel like a racialized underclass in neoliberal Estonia. Excluded from the nation on the basis of ethnicity, they try to maintain their dignity through the discourse of hard work as a basis for membership in society. Based on the longer-term analysis of Estonian history, I argue that the current outcome for the Russian-speaking working class is related to longer historical processes of class formation whereby each period in the Estonian history of the twentieth century seems to be the reversal of the previous one. I also argue for analysis of social change in Eastern Europe that does not focus solely on ethnicity but is linked to class formation processes.

Conformity and Idiosyncrasy: Jean Rhys

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
Female Images ◽  
Image Construction ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Professional Mobility

By looking at Jean Rhys’s ‘Left Bank’ fiction (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, ‘Illusion’, ‘Mannequin’), this chapter investigates how new operational procedures such as Fordism and Taylorism, which were introduced into the French couture industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, affected constructions of modern femininity. Increasingly standardized images of feminine types were produced by Paris couturiers while the new look of the Flapper seemingly advertised women’s expanding social, political and professional mobility. Rhys, this chapter argues, noted fashion’s ability to provide resources for creative image construction but she simultaneously expressed criticism of its tendency to standardize female costumes and behaviour. Ultimately, Rhys demonstrates in her fiction that the radically modern couture of the early twentieth century was by no means the maker of social change and women’s political modernity. To offset the increased standardization of female images that she witnessed around her, Rhys created heroines and texts that relied on an overt display on difference.  

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