Into Our Labours
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€116.99
A01=Neil Lazarus
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Author_Neil Lazarus
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Capitalist world-system
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSA
Category=DSBH5
comparative literature
COP=United Kingdom
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eq_biography-true-stories
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labour
Language_English
modernisation
Modernism
modernity
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postcolonial studies
Price_€100 and above
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Representation and registration in literature
softlaunch
The experience of work
work
world literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781802070101
- Dimensions: 163 x 239mm
- Publication Date: 15 Apr 2022
- Publisher: Liverpool University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Into our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding’ of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural’ experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in contexts in which market-oriented commodity production has become the dominant form of social labour are counterposed with inherited ways of seeing and knowing, now under acute pressure if not already obsolete. Second, a moment corresponding to the consolidation, regularisation and global dispersal of capitalist development. Into Our Labours focuses on the naturalisation of capitalist social relations: forms of sociality and solidarity, ideologies of familialism, individualism and work, relations between the sexes and the generations. Arguing that the only plausible term for the vast body of literary work engendered by the worlding of capitalist social relations is ‘modernist’, the book proposes that it is then important to challenge the still-entrenched Eurocentric understandings of modernism. Modernism is neither originally nor paradigmatically ‘Western’ in provenance; and its temporal parameters are much broader than are usually assumed in modernist studies, extending both backward and forward in time.
Neil Lazarus is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick.
