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Spark's balladisation of work
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Gardiner, Michael (2017) Spark's balladisation of work. The Bottle Imp (22).
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Official URL: https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2017/11/sparks-bal...
Abstract
First published at the end of 1960, The Ballad of Peckham Rye sends Edinburgh graduate Dougal Douglas to an unglamorous region of south London, and a world that has seen a large-scale rationalisation of work during the post-war consensus. Dougal succeeds a Cambridge Time and Motion man to unleash chaos into this environment, exasperating union man Humphrey Place by suggesting absenteeism to the workers, scandalising Humphrey’s fiancée Dixie with his sexualised and vaguely demonic presence, and puzzling his boss Mr. Druce, who had expected Dougal to concentrate on efficiency, whereas he encourages absenteeism and moonlights on another job by ‘doubling’ himself and reversing his name. In their own ways these three become comic foils in their tendencies to measure time by work: Druce struggles to explain the imperative of production, Humphrey earnestly obsesses over the fairness of work rates, Dixie, aspirational and hyper-aware of class gradations, dedicates her youth to saving.1 Within which environment of work rationalisation, Dougal lives an excess described in bodily and in poetic terms.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PE English | ||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | The Bottle Imp | ||||||
Publisher: | Association for Scottish Literary Studies | ||||||
Official Date: | November 2017 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Number: | 22 | ||||||
Status: | Not Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) |
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