British Fiction and the Struggle Against Work offers an account of British literary responses to work from the 1950s to the onset of the financial crisis of 2008/9. Roberto del Valle Alcala argues that throughout this period, working-class writing developed new strategies of resistance against the social discipline imposed by capitalist work. As the latter becomes an increasingly pervasive and inescapable form of control and as its nature grows abstract, diffuse, and precarious, writing about it acquires a new antagonistic quality, producing new forms of subjective autonomy and new imaginaries of a possible life beyond its purview. By tracing a genealogy of working-class authors and texts that in various ways defined themselves against the social discipline imposed by post-war capitalism, this book analyses the strategies adopted by workers in their attempts to identify and combat the source of their oppression. Drawing on the work of a wide range of theorists including Deleuze and Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, Alcala offers a systematic and innovative account of British literary treatments of work. The book includes close readings of fiction by Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Nell Dunn, Pat Barker, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Monica Ali, and Joanna Kavenna.

Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted, the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the words of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul Murray and Zadie Smith among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism.

Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted, the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the words of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul Murray and Zadie Smith among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism.

British Fiction and the Struggle Against Work offers an account of British literary responses to work from the 1950s to the onset of the financial crisis of 2008/9. Roberto del Valle Alcala argues that throughout this period, working-class writing developed new strategies of resistance against the social discipline imposed by capitalist work. As the latter becomes an increasingly pervasive and inescapable form of control and as its nature grows abstract, diffuse, and precarious, writing about it acquires a new antagonistic quality, producing new forms of subjective autonomy and new imaginaries of a possible life beyond its purview. By tracing a genealogy of working-class authors and texts that in various ways defined themselves against the social discipline imposed by post-war capitalism, this book analyses the strategies adopted by workers in their attempts to identify and combat the source of their oppression. Drawing on the work of a wide range of theorists including Deleuze and Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, Alcala offers a systematic and innovative account of British literary treatments of work. The book includes close readings of fiction by Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Nell Dunn, Pat Barker, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Monica Ali, and Joanna Kavenna.