Romantic Period Laboring-Class Poetry

This essay surveys significant developments in laboring-class poetry in the Romantic period, most notably the recognition of a self-aware tradition, comprising hundreds of poets, many of whom have been recovered in the last 30 years. Scholars have shifted their approach to the study of laboring-class poets to assert their artistic accomplishments and vital contributions to key characteristics and themes of Romanticism, including the focus on nature, agricultural change, and regional culture, simplicity in style, and experimentation with the ballad form. How the poets were published underwent changes in the period, as many struggled with patrons and found new venues for their work due to the growth of newspapers and periodicals. The current digitization of the archive as well as digital humanities methodologies have opened up the study of the tradition, making possible new discoveries and new understandings of its reach and importance.

Showing and hiding: The flickering visibility of earth workers in the archives of earth science

This essay interrogates the motives of eighteenth-century European naturalists to alternately show and hide their laboring-class fossil suppliers. Focusing on rare moments of heightened visibility, I ask why gentlemen naturalists occasionally, deliberately, and even performatively made visible the marginalized science workers on whom they crucially depended but more typically ignored or effaced. Comparing archival fragments from elite works of natural history across a considerable stretch of time and space, including Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and French, Spanish, and British America, this essay sketches the contours of a disparate group of people I term ‘earth workers’: laborers of very low social rank, such as quarrymen, shepherds, ditch-diggers, and fieldworkers, whose daily labor in and on the earth enabled the discovery of subterranean specimens. At the same time, archival traces of laboring lives ultimately reveal more about the naturalists who created them than they do about the marginalized laborers whose lives they faintly record. Cultural norms of elite masculinity and scholarly self-presentation in the Republic of Letters help us to understand why some eighteenth-century naturalists felt they had to publicly disavow a form of labor that would come to be recognized as a crucial and skilled part of scientific fieldwork in the modern era. Compared to other kinds of invisible labor that historians of science have brought into view, the social meaning of earth work rendered it uniquely visible in some ways and uniquely invisible in others.

From Politics to Pope: An Account of the Group Aesthetic

This paper discusses the study of Chartist and working-class literatures, noting that the pronounced development of aesthetic criticism in these areas uncomfortably corresponds with the rejection of “aesthetics” in other fields. Chartist, working-class, and laboring-class scholars have broken free from monolithically sociological or political readings that only a generation ago too often dismissed artistic endeavors as, at best, merely a re-accenting of the mainstream. Current studies focus on the aesthetic innovations that emerged out of working-class entanglements with mainstream counterparts. The paper argues that the rejection of “aesthetics” generally fails to recognize marginalized and group aesthetics (including the critical work done on marginalized and group aesthetics) and specifically what it meant for a political cohort—the Chartists are my example—to think aesthetically.

Interconnection of Class and Race with Capitalism

This article focuses on the interconnection of class and race with capitalism. First it presents a definition of capitalism and its attitude towards civil statuses and exploitation. Secondly, it analyzes the origins of racism in capitalism despite its emphasis on freedom and equality, and its indifference to the social identities of the people it exploits. Consequently, it examines racial oppression as a strategy for capitalist control of the laboring class. In the end it focuses on the very important distinction between oppression and exploitation. These distinct relations also have very different impact on the behavior of social agents and groups, their life opportunities and forms of social conflict. If we want to understand how racial hierarchies reproduce capitalist class relations, we have to understand the basic requirements of class relations and capitalist reproduction itself.