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The concept of 'experience' and the making of the English Working Class, 1924-1963
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Middleton, Stuart (2016) The concept of 'experience' and the making of the English Working Class, 1924-1963. Modern Intellectual History, 13 (1). pp. 179-208. doi:10.1017/S1479244314000596
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244314000596
Abstract
Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Modern Intellectual History | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 1479-2443 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | April 2016 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 13 | ||||||||
| Number: | 1 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 179-208 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1017/S1479244314000596 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
| Related URLs: |
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