The nature of working-class literature: an ecofeminist critique, /

Abstract

In recent years, literary scholars have begun to distrust, challenge, and expand the canon, which formerly limited students of literature to the study of dead, white, upperclass male writers. In addition to contemporary writers, women writers and writers of color, the academy has begun to study writers who come from and/or represent the causes of the working-class. This sub-genre has served a tranformative, political function, and scholars, aided by the writings of Marx, have rightly recognized the class and gender issues that are often explicit in the texts. Another oppressed "other" is also present in several important texts of working-class fiction and poetry: the environment. Much working-class literature captures the abuse of the Earth, alongside the abuses of workers and of women, and scholars of working-class studies have yet to explore this literary territory. In this thesis, I propose an ecofeminist way of reading working-class literature that recognizes this additional "other." An ecofeminist reading seeks to avoid setting up a hierarchy of oppressions. As ecofeminist critic Patrick Murphy has noted, ecofeminism places multiple abuses in the global context of the relationships human beings have with the natural world. So I examine the ways nature is both oppressed and empowered in working-class literature; how the authors portray the ecology alongside issues of class and gender; and to the unique, sometimes contradictory ways nature is aligned with the feminine.