Tom Woodin
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780719091117
- eISBN:
- 9781526139023
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719091117.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
The writing produced in workshops explored varied forms of expression including autobiography, short stories, dialect, drama, poetry and novels. Overall there were significant debates about the ...
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The writing produced in workshops explored varied forms of expression including autobiography, short stories, dialect, drama, poetry and novels. Overall there were significant debates about the nature and meaning of working class writing and whether it had any distinctive features. Divisions between forms of writing were actively challenged and new forms of subjectivity and ways of representing experience were developed. However, there were also pressures to write within existing forms. New modes of expression could become tiring after a time when different approaches were required. Overall writing in the Fed was marked by the creative interpretation of experience and vernacular voice. It reveals tensions between bearing witness and creative interpretation and between representing a collective social experience and the individual life story.Less
The writing produced in workshops explored varied forms of expression including autobiography, short stories, dialect, drama, poetry and novels. Overall there were significant debates about the nature and meaning of working class writing and whether it had any distinctive features. Divisions between forms of writing were actively challenged and new forms of subjectivity and ways of representing experience were developed. However, there were also pressures to write within existing forms. New modes of expression could become tiring after a time when different approaches were required. Overall writing in the Fed was marked by the creative interpretation of experience and vernacular voice. It reveals tensions between bearing witness and creative interpretation and between representing a collective social experience and the individual life story.
David Forrest and Sue Vice
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784992620
- eISBN:
- 9781526132208
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992620.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book analyses all of Barry Hines’s written works, including fiction, screenplays for film and television and scripts for the theatre. We draw on Barry Hines’s archive, in which appear several ...
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This book analyses all of Barry Hines’s written works, including fiction, screenplays for film and television and scripts for the theatre. We draw on Barry Hines’s archive, in which appear several novels and screenplays which were never published or produced. We argue throughout that Hines’s best-known works are deservedly his 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, and the 1984 atomic-war drama Threads. Both works have become central elements of British cultural history, A Kestrel for a Knave for its portrait of a schoolboy who tries to transcend his limited circumstances, Threads for its powerful portrayal of ordinary lives and communities destroyed by a nuclear attack. Yet the poetic realism that characterizes these works is evident in the very wide range of other kinds of writing that Hines produced, over the forty years of his writing life. Hines’s other works draw on the themes that preoccupied him, including injustice and deprivation, in relation to fiction and scripts about coal-mining, landowners, football, education and gender, culminating in works that represented Britain as multicultural and post-industrial nation. We argue that Hines’s entire oeuvre is as deserving of attention as that given to his best-known works.Less
This book analyses all of Barry Hines’s written works, including fiction, screenplays for film and television and scripts for the theatre. We draw on Barry Hines’s archive, in which appear several novels and screenplays which were never published or produced. We argue throughout that Hines’s best-known works are deservedly his 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, and the 1984 atomic-war drama Threads. Both works have become central elements of British cultural history, A Kestrel for a Knave for its portrait of a schoolboy who tries to transcend his limited circumstances, Threads for its powerful portrayal of ordinary lives and communities destroyed by a nuclear attack. Yet the poetic realism that characterizes these works is evident in the very wide range of other kinds of writing that Hines produced, over the forty years of his writing life. Hines’s other works draw on the themes that preoccupied him, including injustice and deprivation, in relation to fiction and scripts about coal-mining, landowners, football, education and gender, culminating in works that represented Britain as multicultural and post-industrial nation. We argue that Hines’s entire oeuvre is as deserving of attention as that given to his best-known works.
